Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects

Bronson does his usual violent-teddy-bear number believably, and the other actors do what they can with the formula script and hack direction.

The screenplay, by Harold Nebenzal, leaves one end of this story conspicuously untied, but it does its best to titillate the audience with a mixture of teen-age porn and trademark Bronson spitefulness.

Thompson has always had an evil sense of humor, and the movie repeatedly crosses the line between dramatizing a situation and exploiting it, exposing racism or moral rot and almost indulging in it. But the disturbance you feel in watching Kinjite doesn’t just come because it has a sordid subject, some bad scenes or a heavy cargo of shock and sleaze, but because it leaves us, much of the time, with no moral anchor.

An odd, well-made and thoroughly unpleasant thriller.

Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects could be the worst Charles Bronson film ever, and that's saying something. If it were any slower, it would be running backward.

A dull parade of violence, calculated sleaze and midlife angst. [08 Feb 1989, p.D05]

B-movie king Charles Bronson, whose long association with Cannon Films has set all-time lows in the idiotic, hits rock bottom in Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. [03 Feb 1989, p.C5]