Leo is a young, talented and promising boxer. Although he is restrained in showing his feelings, his life seems to be settled and quite satisfying. However, during one of his fights everything changes. After he gets knocked out unexpectedly, he is hospitalized and finds out that he has a brain tumor. The news leaves him feeling devastated, he is just wandering around Tokyo when in one of the side streets he encounters a frightened girl who is being chased by an intrusive guy. Having nothing left to lose, Leo decides to knock the man out. A well-targeted blow starts the most twisted night of the boy’s life. The people he meets turn out to be implicated in a drug scam. Leo realizes that the girl is a target of the Japanese mafia, an enraged assassin, Chinese criminals and a corrupt cop. A bag full of drugs circulates around the city, everyone wants to kill each other, the whole situation is a big misunderstanding, and the young boxer, well…he shrugs his shoulders and helps the girl. After all, he has nothing to lose. Apparently.
“First Love” is an energetic romance of a dynamic action movie with a great deal of black comedy that leads the viewer directly to a concurrent comic and bloody ride in the end. The twisted plot makes it possible for the film to portray both the story of the nascent feeling between broken young people and a comedy of errors involving a member of the mafia who is not entirely savvy. Takashi Miike has accustomed his audience to litres of blood, whistling swords and severed limbs in wholesale quantities. And this time he does not disappoint, adorning everything with a large dose of black humour.
