The City of Lost Souls

What can I say... Takashi Miike is one whose movies I enjoy more and more these days and The City Of Lost Souls isn't an exception. The piece itself is about a Brazilian protagonist and his girlfriend, trying their best to cross the border from Japan to Taiwan. They stumble upon trouble on the way, interfering with Yakuza's business and the outcome becomes a quite fast-paced roller-coaster action with violence, punchlines, and, I must add that there's also a great load of comedy here.

Anyone expecting hardcore violence throughout the entire piece may get disappointed. If you got some distance though and are open for hybrid stuff then this piece won't disappoint you. It awesome and funny, with a great mixture between the raw and cold violent scenes and the funny, surprising scenes of comedy. The language mix between Brazilian Portugese, Mandarin and Japanese is just a great additional bonus.

What Takashi Miike is driven by is of course shock and irreverence. And He succeeded quite well here : lots of useless violence, lots of humor (the blood of the gunfighters drawing "love" on the ground), lots of bad taste. But "Audition" was characterized by the same ingredients. Not to be taken seriously of course. It's true that the codes of the genre are destroyed, played with : the hero is non-asian, the asians (all yakuza or triad members are worthless human beings driven by sadistic and violent impulses) And the end is a jewel in itself perverting the usual codes in the same way as the rest of the picture Great fun ! (another oddity : it must be the only Japanese picture in which half of the dialogue is in Portuguese...)

Contrary to some of the other imdb users' comments, CITY OF LOST SOULS is one of Takashi Miike's most entertaining films. While not possessing quite the same intensity or shock value of other Miike masterpieces like DEAD OR ALIVE, CITY...nevertheless is fastmoving, balances comic book tall tale surrealism expertly with plenty of violence, sick humor as well as the doomed love story -- what more could you ask? It is NOT the run of the mill generic, mediocre, forgettable action film that most great action film directors are turning out these days. And it involves you with the characters (a multi-ethnic melting pot -- which, as astounding as it may seem to some incredulous viewers, is what major Japanese urban centers are like in this day and age -- by the way, Brazil, home country of lead halfbreed character,Mario, has one of the largest Japanese immigrant populations in the world). If you enjoy Miike, don't miss this. It's his most romantic film (!) without sacrificing any of the blood, the dark, dark humor or bizarre imagery we've come to expect from this unpredictable genius.

I enjoyed this movie, but I had hoped for more.

This is a straight forward story with lots of off the wall mini scenes/story's between the meat and potatoes of a very average revenge/gangster/drug tale.

The action sequences are pretty good to very good, and the gore level is not too bad(keep in mind this is Japanese in taste and style) Teah just does not make for a charismatic lead, but the rest of the cast were extremely watchable.

There is as always in these style of movies some light humour thrown it to lighten the violence.

This movie was good, but just not that satisfying or mindblowing...I recommend if you know the style and like the director.

Takashi Miike's City of Lost Souls (also known as Hazard City, 2000) is very different due to its multi nation cast which includes Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and some others. The protagonist is Mario who is a Japanese/Brazilian who has beautiful Chinese girlfriend Kei who he frees in the outrageous beginning of the movie from some immigration system. Then they try to get out of Japan, but before they can, they have to deal with crazy Yakuza members, Mario's ex-girlfriend and her little girl and irritating radio host. This film reminds distantly of Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels so that gives a clue how much things happen in this film; you're right, a lot.

This is one wild ride to experience and even though it's not the director's masterpiece, it's still very interesting film and personal to say the least. The film is full of details to be found and crazy ideas, and Takashi is definitely among the most interesting directors of today. There are long takes without edits, weird and crazy camera angles (the toilet!), wild action scenes, CGI and some outrageous gags mostly towards some Hollywood blockbusters like The Matrix. The cockfight scene is totally unbelievable and I'd like to know what do the Wachowsky brothers think about this film! The very menacing "blade" effect at the end is again very personal and the kind of crazy idea one could expect from this director and Japanese cinema in general. The violence and action is very comic book like and thus not too shocking nor disturbing and that's not even the purpose. Fudoh (1995) is far more serious film and very masterful piece of Yakuza genre and alongside Audition (1999), it is Takashi's masterpiece.

City of Lost Souls raises some interesting topics mostly about different races and how we after all are very similar no matter what "race" or nation we belong to. All the characters are more or less tragicomic and show that there's absolutely no culture or person in the world who could be described as "perfect" or without flaws; people in City of Lost Souls are selfish, stupid, violent and proud of themselves so these are exactly the same things which plague every human being in the world. These things are not necessarily active in every case, but they're still there "un-active" and waiting for some stimulation to become active because, in my opinion, they belong to human nature, whether we wanted to accept it or not. City of Lost Souls tells many thins about us humans, but it tells them with little like tongue in cheek and with plenty of humor and lightening elements and so the film becomes even more interesting. The same case is with Mario Bava's slasher classic Bay of Blood aka Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971), which is a horror film on one level, but ends up being a hilarious satire and black comedy during the end, and the final scene in Bava's film is very memorable and, in a way, little similar to Takashi's film's end and how and why Kei and Mario end up like that.

City of Lost Souls is very easy to watch many times due to its creative content and over-the-top personal director, who hopefully manages to make more interesting films for many years to come. It is ridiculous but also sad how many just think this is some non-sense director whose films are so good just because of their often strong violence and other shock elements. Takashi Miike is another great talent in the growing list of Japanese talents, and his films are far more than many manage to understand and see.

8/10