Full Metal gokudô

Japanese film maker talent and inventive genius Takashi Miike (born 1960) has done incredible amount of films in his not-even-so-long career so far. He has done made-for-video cheapies and big screen films that vary from unconventional and wonderful Yakuza tales to insane comic book adaptations to mind blowing satires, and the greater the themes in these films are, the more serious he is and uses his ideas and crazy creativity with restraint inside the otherwise serious world he's created: a bazooka torn from a guy's back isn't any funny moment in Dead or Alive (1999) but has its important meaning for the theme telling so much about the character(s) and their values in the violent world Miike depicts.

His Full Metal Yakuza aka Full Metal Gokudo (1997) belongs to the cheap and fastly made video films and it is easy to tell it is a very exploitation oriented market that wants simple, violent and graphic films without much more merits in them. Full Metal Yakuza tells the Robocop-like (1987, Paul Verhoeven) story of a killed Yakuza who gets back to life as he is turned into a robot/human by one crazy scientist. He wants to avenge the death of his friend as well as try to save his former love from the sadistic hands of the rival Yakuza. Ultra violence and gore ensues and all the potential that was used to wonderful perfection in Fudoh (1996), for example, is not there in this film.

There are some nice Japanese cinema elements like the silence that tells more than words. The scene in the beach after a refusal to kill one Yakuza boss is especially memorable and also close to the work of Takeshi Kitano. Still the revenge theme is not handled here as it was in Dead or Alive or Fudoh. In Full Metal Yakuza, violence and acts of revenge don't have any other meaning than to satisfy the gore audience and that is pretty sad for those who'd like to see Miike making more serious cinema all the time. In real world, violence and revenge is never as harmless and fun as in this film and Miike for sure would have talents to make real films from the subject matter, as he's done. Also the ending, showing how desperate the characters are for personal revenge and payback would be as wonderful as in those other films, but now it all is just mostly comical trash as Miike definitely wasn't doing this for anything else than money and to satisfy his huge need to work. It is hard to make any interpretations on single images and scenes while everything before and after them fights against any serious analyzes.

The film is high on its gore level and so reminds pretty much of Ichi the Killer, a film that is filled with cartoonish violence and blood plus sadism towards both females and males. Full Metal Yakuza has plenty of swordfights (!) and other bloody carnage that gives the makers an opportunity to throw in plenty of blood geysirs and splatter that satisfies some viewers but is not enough when the film is by talented director like Miike. Neither this or Ichi the Killer are to be taken seriously (hardly anyone takes, at least Full Metal Yakuza), and especially Ichi, despite its flaws and negative sides, tells something about the audience, that laughs looking like a bunch of monkeys and as sorry characters as those inside the film, when someone's being tortured and brutally murdered. Ichi the Killer has also some interesting elements in the form of Ichi himself, who is a traumatized boy with violent environment and society around him. This important theme is handled more carefully in Rainy Dog and also in Fudoh.

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.

Even if this is not top notch Miike it is always going to be worth watching. The first ten minutes or so are a little confusing (as usual) with, here a yakuza, there a yakuza, one shoots one and another shoots another. Shot and sliced splendidly it has to be said with fountains of blood from headless necks and severed arms in the sidewalk! Soon enough all is clear and a fairly simple tale unfolds enlivened no end by the main character being formed of 'full metal'. There is humour throughout and also some gruelling scenes plus a little more sex than I recall seeing in other Miike films. Not as profound as some, although we probably miss the Japanese social nuances, but a fun ride with more than the odd gasp and wince.

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.

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.