is a 1999 Japanese comedy film directed by

Shinobu Yaguchi is a Japanese film director and screenwriter. He specializes in feel-good "zero to hero" films, where a group of people take up an unlikely activity, face a number of obstacles, but finally succeed. His film '' Waterboys'' was particularly succ ...

Plot

A young milktoast car rental company driver named Satoru Suzuki (

Masanobu Ando is a Japanese actor. Ando has appeared in films such as Takeshi Kitano's ''Kids Return'' (1996), Kinji Fukasaku's '' Battle Royale'' (2000), Takashi Miike's ''Sukiyaki Western Django'' (2007), and Chen Kaige's '' Forever Enthralled'' (2008). He ...

) and a mousy nurse named Shizuko Sato ( Hikari Ishida) are both in dire need of a confidence boost. Through a string of unbelievable events they meet and then fall into a wealth of

yakuza , also known as , are members of transnational organized crime syndicates originating in Japan. The Japanese police and media, by request of the police, call them , while the ''yakuza'' call themselves . The English equivalent for the ter ...

money. They are chased by the monstrous yakuza as well as his stooge like young henchmen.

Release

''Adrenaline Drive'' was released in Japan in 1999 and was shown at the 1999

Toronto International Film Festival The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF, often stylized as tiff) is one of the largest publicly attended film festivals in the world, attracting over 480,000 people annually. Since its founding in 1976, TIFF has grown to become a perman ...

. It received a limited release in the United States on May 5, 2000. The film grossed a total of $77,313 on its American wide release.

Reception

''Adrenaline Drive'' was well received by Western critics on its initial release. The film ranking website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wan ...

reported that 75% of critics had given the film positive reviews, based upon a sample of 20. At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...

score of 69, based on 24 reviews.

Notes

External links

* 1999 films 1990s Japanese-language films Japanese romantic comedy films 1999 romantic comedy films 1990s crime comedy films Japanese black comedy films Japanese road movies 1990s road movies Yakuza films 1990s Japanese films {{1990s-romantic-comedy-film-stub