Full Metal gokudô

Guess that in potential this could had been a truly awesome and insane revenge flick but the movie instead goes for a more over-the-top and comedy like approach. It doesn't really has the desired effect, since it more often makes the movie just silly instead of entertaining or funny.

Normally I either really love or truly dislike a Takashi Miike movie but in this case I'm stuck in the middle somewhere. I really didn't hated the movie but at the same time was also never impressed- or entertained enough by it.

Because the movie takes a more comedic approach, it's also being a more simplistic one to watch. It's very straight-forward, without any good depth or underlying emotions to the movie its story and themes. It's why the movie feels like a bit of a bland one, as well as redundant, even for the fans of Takashi Miike movies.

For a Takashi Miike movie it also certainly isn't edgy enough. It sounds weird, with all of the violence and gore in this movie but the movie feels quite tame and like it's holding back with its graphic violence. This is something Takashi Miike normally really never ever does! But it's a movie from before the days he became an established name really, so it perhaps isn't so surprising that this movie doesn't feel as edgy and daring as most of his later work.

Another problem I really had with this movie was its story. To say it bluntly; this movie really seems to be a Japanese remake of "RoboCop". It uses a very similar concept and even some of the characters and sequences seem alike. So originality was also a big problem with this movie. And as a matter of fact, it makes the movie even weaker, considering that it isn't even halve as good or half as edgy and daring as Paul Verhoeven's "RoboCop". It makes this movie feel like a bit of a lame rip-off attempt.

But despite all criticism, this is still a movie you could have some fun with. It's definitely entertaining to watch in parts and with a Takashi Miike movie you are always getting something unique and unusual. The movie is still filled with plenty of moments like that. So despite not being to original with its story, it still is at least being original with some of its scene's.

6/10

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Takashi Miike may well be the savior of modern cinema - more than any other film maker I'm aware of, Miike keeps pushing the boundaries of the art form. He's also got a deliciously sick sense of humour.

Full Metal Gokudo is an early Miike movie (with the rate he produces movies, even 5 years ago is a long way back in his career). It's a made for video ultra-cheapy, probably made in a couple of weeks for a few thousand yen. The basic premise is Robocop meets a Yakuza movie... producing the Full Metal Gokudo himself, a low ranking Yakuza gangster whose body is reanimated by a self-proclaimed genius scientist, to be a crime fighting superhero. Though things don't quite go according to his plans.

Despite the very very low budget and terrible special effects, FMG contains buckets of that Miike imagination and intellect. Subtle, dark humour occasionally gives way to comic absurdity - and occasionally to something much darker and more disturbing. Nothing as sick as you will find in Ichi The Killer or Fudoh, but enough to trouble the more squeamish viewers no doubt. There's a little bit of a heart in the movie too though, for the viewer who can look past the gore and idiocy.

Mostly though, FMG is just a silly comedy. It takes a bunch of mostly loathsome characters and puts them in a ridiculous situation, then has fun seeing how everybody reacts. It's a movie that could only have come from Japan, and probably only from Takashi Miike himself. The ultra low budget means its never going to get mainstream popularity, but it's the perfect material to become a lightweight cult classic.

I've already seen Takashi Miike's 'Fudoh: The New Generation', 'Visitor Q' and 'Ichi The Killer' so I'm prepared for just about anything from this amazingly prolific and eclectic director. But as 'Full Metal Yakuza' is an early Miike movie, made with a small budget for the direct to video market, I expected it to be a throwaway action comedy with little evidence of Miike's future brilliance. However, much to my delight, it actually still managed to surprise me, and despite being a cheap riff on 'RoboCop' (one of my all time favourite movies) Miike doesn't play it safe, and you can see bits of 'Ichi the Killer' in there waiting to burst out. This was Miike's twentieth(!) movie give or take, and despite having already released his breakthrough film 'Fudoh' it was still a long way before he was to be discovered by Western movie buffs in a big way. Miike was mainly working in the direct to video market which at the time gave film makers a lot of creative freedom if they made low budget genre movies that were able to sell a few thousand copies. He certainly took advantage of that freedom as the movie mixes silly comedy, bloody fight scenes, tacky special effects and costumes with a brutal gang rape sequence which Hollywood action directors just couldn't have gotten away with. Miike says he wanted the audience to be confused in how they were supposed to react and I think he succeeds big time! There are a few familiar faces in the cast from other Miike movies and those by Beat Takeshi and Shinya Tsukamoto, but the star Tsuyoshi Ujiki was unfamiliar to me. In Japan he is best known as a rock star with Kodomo Band. Uliki plays Hagane a bumbling low level yakuza who is killed when he gets caught in an assassination attempt on his boss whom he worships. But in fact Hagane doesn't die, he is resurrected by an eccentric scientist who has created a new body for him made out of a combination of metal and spare parts supplied from his dead boss! The rest you just have to see to believe. Hagane is far from your typical Yazuza tough guy, and in many ways you can see his character as being a dummy run for Ichi. 'Full Metal Yakuza' isn't quite as amazing as 'Fudoh' or 'Ichi' but it's still pretty out there and highly recommended to fans of extreme Asian action.

Seriously, its worthy of a Something Awful or iMockery skewering. I can only assume that this movie was supposed to be a black comedy, made to seem cheesy on purpose ala Troma. However this just ended up being bad. Not like a 'so bad its good' kind of bad. More like a 'Please God, make this movie stop' kind of bad. I mean I 'got' what Miike was trying to do. This was supposed to be some unholy combination of a yakuza film and the imagery of a kitschy Japanese 70's beat-em-up serial. Complete with bad costumes, writing and sound effects. This train wreck of a movie finally hits rock bottom in the final moment, which MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. I mean as horrible as the rest of the movie is you can understand what is going on. Then they drop that one on you and the film ends with you wanting to kill someone.

Not all that entertaining, and very low budget, but flashes of Miike's wacky brilliance make this worth seeing for fans of his work. A wanna-be yakuza loser bumbles his way through the lower echelon unpleasantness of a gang, before a very unpleasant incident results in his being transformed into a deadly (if goofy-looking) cyborg fighting machine. Will he get revenge or will he just mope around like some whiner from a French movie and short-circuit in the rain?

People familiar with Ichi will see a lot of the same elements (though Ichi does come from different source material). The protagonist of FMG is a proto-Ichi in many ways, full of angst and completely dysfunctional, stalking around in a plated body-suit and not much of a hero. Any serious pathos or plot development is undercut by the wacky joke bits Miike throws in (like our hero learning stances to deflect bullets). The silliness is definitely fun, but the movie is so schizophrenic that most of the enjoyment is of the "Whoa! Did that just happen?" variety. Dig in if you're a Miike fan, otherwise don't start here.