Fudoh: The Next Generation is another in a long line of Yakuza films helmed by Takashi Miike. The big difference here is that the principal Yakuza organisation in the film is made up of adolescents and 5-7 year old boys who are just as deadly as their adult rivals.
The reigning Nio Yakuza clan is made up of five different families, one of the five heads is Iwao Fudoh, and his first lieutenant his oldest son, Ryu. When Ryu orders one of the rival Yasha organisations hit men killed, thus triggering a full scale war between the Yasha and Nio clans, Iwao is asked to make up for his sons mistake and he does so by decapitating him and presenting the head as compensation to the Nio clan.
Upon hearing a noise Iwao's youngest son Riki, awakes and goes to investigate - he stumbles upon the grisly sight of his father beheading his older brother. Cut to ten years later, Riki is now in high school and running an organisation of his own made up of fellow students and a group of little boys. His anger over the death of his brother has not faded in the least and he has plans to wipe out the other four families in the Nio clan and become boss.
Fudoh is really a mindblowing spectacle, we are constantly battered with violent and non-PC imagery, beginning with the sight of two five year-old boys coldly assassinating an elderly Yakuza boss. To see young children effortlessly handling 9mm's is somewhat of a shock to our pre-conditioned minds to start with, but when they continue on to calmly blow an old man's brains out you start to get an idea of what is ahead.
The next slaying involves a poisoned cup of coffee and literally bucketloads of blood. Another features Riki's female friend and classmate Mika, who works on the side at a sleazy strip joint performing her unique act which consists of shooting sharpened darts out of a blowpipe inserted in her vagina and bursting balloons on the other side of the room, though this night, in-between balloons, she shoots a dart right through a Nio leaders head - in one ear and out the other - the dart sinks into the wall with a piece of brain tissue still attached.
Everything about Fudoh is so over-the-top and insanely exaggerated that you seem not to notice that the likelihood of a group of children being at war with the Yakuza is highly improbable. Midway through the film we are shown the children's training camp where we see the kids merrily playing soccer with their English teachers head, this serves again to reinforce the sense of unreality that's at play here. Although, all hyperbole aside, Fudoh also explores the dysfunctional relationship between father and son, a bond so broken down by betrayal and murder that as the two males sit opposite each other eating dinner in silence, each one is plotting a way to execute the other.
All in all, if you dig schoolgirl hermaphrodites, friendly giants, lesbian English teachers, vaginal darts and a large helping of blood and black comedy, this a must-see Miike film.
