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A miasma of great sadness and anger hangs over Jin-roh: The Wolf Brigade. Here we have a violent but also heart-rending modern-day fable that takes "Little Red Riding Hood" as one of its themes and turns it into a grim meditation on violence and duty.

People who come on board expecting to see a John Woo action-fest are not going to walk away happy. The violence of Jin-roh isn't the exhilarating arcade-game exhibitionism of Ghost in the Shell (whose director, Mamoru Oshii, also oversaw Jin-roh); it's more like the bleak and senseless violence we read about in the newspaper. More, in other words, what violence is like when it actually happens to us, and not what we dream about it as.

The story is set in an alternate version of Japan's recent history. After the end of WWII, extreme social unrest provoked the creation of the Capitol Police, a special elite guard unit with heavy armor, night-vision goggles, and machine guns. Their masked, inhuman faces are reminiscent of death machines, or maybe more like abstract evocations of the emotionlessness of Nazi SS guards.