Takashi Miike’s first English language film is a stylish Spaghetti Western homage with a thickly accented Japanese cast and a cameo by Quentin Tarantino – well really, what did you expect…?
You can’t help but notice something of a trend going on in cinema right now. The Western is truly back in fashion for the first time since Clint Eastwood revived the dying genre with his Oscar winning Unforgiven. But if the current crop of Hollywood films, such as The Assassination of Jessie James, seem intent on oh so serious naval gazing, Asia is also picking upon the trend – but looking instead towards Sergio Leone and the more irreverent, playful Spaghetti Westerns of the 60s and early 70s.
Only last month the London Film Festival played host to two: Shashanka Ghosh’s silly, fun Quick Gun Murugan and Kim Jee-woon’s explosive spectacle The Good, The Bad, The Weird. Takashi Miike’s film pre-dates them both and, if anything, falls between them in style. Inspired by Leone’s A Fistful Of Dollars and Sergio Corbucci’s Django, with both films obvious debt to Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Miike has brought that influence full circle with Sukiyaki Western Django.
When a stranger Gunman (Hideaki Ido, The Princess Blade) rolls in to Yuta, a town run by two warring clans, his presence soon upsets the already uneasy balance between them.
The red clad Heike, led by Taira no Kiyomori (Koichi Sato, Starfish Hotel), and white clad Genji, led by Minamoto no Yoshitsune (Yusuke Iseya, Casshern) have locked themselves into a stalemate while trying to uncover a fabled treasure hidden somewhere in the mountain settlement. Both want Gunman to join their ranks, but he has his won agenda. Add in Shizuka (Yoshino Kimura, Copycat Killer), a heart broken dancehall girl for the Genji’s, Ruriko (Kaori Momoi, Memoirs of a Geisha), a seemingly innocuous teahouse owner with a dangerous past, and of course Tarantino, then you can probably already guess what you’re in for.
Takashi Miike (Audition, The Happiness of the Katakuris, Ichi The Killer) latest film is a stylish Western that wears its influences very much on its sleeve. It strongly echoes the plot of Yojimbo, directly references Django with machine gun kept in a dragged coffin, and even Sam Raimi’s early 90s Leone homage The Quick And The Dead, but if anything, its Eastwood’s very Italian styled revenger High Plains Drifter that most readily springs to mind, with its red washed town and protagonist’s obvious, but unspoken, own motives at play.
There are some nice touches to Masa Nakamura’s script, whose collaborations with Miike include Big Bang Love, Juvenile A and Dead Or Alive 2, particularly when Kiyomori becomes obsessed with Shakespeare’s Henry VI and English The War Of The Roses, believing the Reds won (an inaccuracy not lost on a British audience).
However, despite the heavily stylised way in which Sukiyaki is shot, including set pieces on a soundstage, Miike’s references all rather flat, seeming to replay those old scenes almost exactly as they where in the original films, rather than play with them. Strangely, it’s irreverent – and almost humourless – way to treat the material lacks the true spirit of those Italian filmmakers. By the time we get Full Contact/Matrix style bullet time effects (which we’ve seen in Western’s before, such as Tears Of The Black Tiger), even having them pit against a samurai sword can’t lift this from feeling tired.
Despite a solid cast, few performances escape the mangling of the English language they put us through. Those standouts include Teruyuki Kagawa as Sheriff Hoanka with his Golum-like split personalities, Koichi Sato fantastically hamming up the cowardly Kiyomori, and the real star of the film Kaori Momoi, who turns out to be the deadliest gunslinger of them all.
It is, of course, an intended indulgence of Miike’s that the production schedule didn’t allow his actors to learn their lines particularly well. And don’t get me wrong. I LOVE that Miike can do that. I LOVE that Miike can do, really, pretty much whatever he likes! But that doesn’t stop it from being rather self-indulgent. You can’t help but wonder if he’s taken on a lot more than he can possibly quality control at the moment – 2007 lists Sukiyaki amongst two (or three, depending where you look) other films and a stage play amongst his work for the year, and 2008 looks just as busy. Can this possibly be a good thing? Sukiyaki seems too rushed in concept and production to achieve a coherent whole.
It’s an entertaining enough film, but somehow it lacks that little bit extra to make a lasting impression – you know what you are getting and sadly, nothing here really surprises. It’s also unfortunate – for the UK at least – that Sukiyaki Western Django will be released at a similar time to films like Quick Gun Murugan and The Good, The Bad, The Weird – as the comparison does it no favours, lacking the former’s charm, and the latter’s inherent love of filmmaking.
Sukiyaki Western Django will be released on DVD by Contender Home Entertainment in the UK on 2nd February 2009.
DVD details
Distributor: Contender Home Entertainment (UK)
Features on the DVD will include: deleted scenes; Q&A with Quentin Tarantino; English 5.1, Stereo and DTS audio options.
