I want to see this when the subtitled DVD gets stateside. I’m a huge fan of the “hardboiled cop”-type movies, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series in particular. The larger issues raised in the article are also fascinating. Film scholars routinely analyze figures like Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer as throwbacks to the cultural archetype of the cowboy, the anti-hero who walks the thin line between civilization and savagery. Essentially, High Noon with cars and machine guns. But the theme seems to have wide resonance among many foreign audiences. I once read in a Criterion collection essay on Charles Bronson’s Death Watch that the author had seen it screened in Africa, the Middle East, and many parts of Asia–and each the time the audience broke into wild applause when Bronson began to gun down the gutter punks who killed his family. Perhaps the figure of the vigilante who takes the law into his own hands is more of a universal archetype than an American one.