Andrew reviews Takashi Miike's hyperviolent manga masterpiece.
Are there any films out
there which address audience bloodlust as successfully as Michael Haneke’s Funny Games or Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers? Although both films assail the viewer with
extremely violent scenes of murder and death while simultaneously critiquing
the viewer for their fervent consumption of such dangerous images, very few of
them manage to purport the same argument without taking a holier than thou
moralistic stance on the topic. One such
fantastical horror film however has managed to be at once a vampiric feast of
flesh and blood and a condemnation of the very images onscreen without being
preachy or forced, letting the viewer arrive at their own conclusions instead
of being led by the hand of the auteur.
That film is cult Japanese director Takashi Miike’s 2001 hyperkinetic,
comical, cringe and wretch inducing manga based yakuza shocker Ichi the Killer. Based upon the manga by artist Hideo Yamamoto
(not to be confused with Miike’s regular cinematographer of the same name) and
adapted by Gozu screenwriter Sakichi
Sato, the film tells the ensemble story of two homicidal maniacs at the
epicenter of a brutal and bloody war between rival yakuza factions. 
While peppered with a
cacophony of minor yakuza characters, the film is primarily a personal battle
between the film’s deadliest characters, one of whom is a sadistic and
sadomasochistic yakuza monster named Kakihara (Tadanabou Asano) and the other
being a deeply disturbed sociopath named Ichi (Nao Omori) who is induced to
commit ghastly murders by Jijii (Tetsuo:
The Iron Man director Shinya Tsukamoto), the leader of a cleanup crew picking
up after the severed limbs and entrails of Ichi’s handiwork. At once a yakuza picture of the new
millennium and an exercise in sadistic manga ultraviolence, Ichi the Killer at once functions as a
character study of two deeply disturbed men while drawing a thinly veiled
connection between ourselves and the monsters onscreen. Filled with Miike’s trademark mixture of both
cartoonishly artificial and cruelly realistic violence with little insight
towards how we the viewer should take the amoral transgressions happening
onscreen, Ichi the Killer is at once
a ragingly controversial exploitation of the nastiest resources of modern
horror and a scathing critique of the viewer for eagerly consuming said
exploitations. Among the film’s many
startling images is a brief moment where the camera passes by a dead body in a
tube television box laid out on the street corner by the trash as passerby walk
on without batting an eye, suggesting shock and awe is so common in the media
the average person has become desensitized to its presence.
Particularly cruel
towards its female characters past the point of misogyny (though arguably the
male characters fare worse for wear), no one in this mean and mad sadism
drenched romp gets away clean or in one piece.
And yet there’s a method to Miike and Yamamoto’s madness, grounding the
shocks with a character driven underpinning contrasting the moral compasses of
Kakihara and Ichi. Though titled Ichi the Killer while giving equal time
to both characters, Miike’s film is mostly about our connection to the depraved
but flamboyantly cool Kakihara. With his
bleached blond hair barely obscuring his battle scarred face with two slits across
his lips, forming a Joker-like smile held together by two rings, a standout
image includes the sicko in question smoking a cigarette as he casually blows
smoke from the open cuts in his face.
While we might be appalled by Kakihara’s actions as he grins his way
through every slicing and dicing he commits, including a scene involving meat
hooks and needles that will make your hair stand on end, we’re undeniably drawn
into the groovy and almost homoerotic aura radiating from the man. Ichi on the other hand is a far more
mercurial and debatably more vile character for having as much guilt over his
bloodshed as sexual arousal, including a polarizing and potentially offensive
opening sequence where he masturbates to a pimp violently raping a prostitute,
the film’s title itself rising up from a puddle of semen on the balcony.
From the get go, Ichi the Killer feels like an angry punk
trolling puritanical sensibilities with all the subtlety of a flasher shaking
his publicly exposed member about.
Causing enormous controversy upon release, the film is banned in at
least three countries and faced heavy censorship throughout the world with
heavy cuts imposed on many sequences while other scenes are dropped in their
entirety. When I first saw this in the
theater, I was handed a vomit bag at the ticket booth which I still have today. My first exposure to who would soon become
one of my favorite modern Japanese directors catches the insanely prolific
provocateur around the time his films first started receiving attention in the
United States. Still very busy in the
film world including having achieved mainstream critical and commercial
solidarity in the years since his still divisive and for some offensive Ichi the Killer, Miike has shown no
signs of slowing down his output or softening the sharp edges his works has
become notorious for. An obvious influence on Kill Bill Vol. 1, notably with the Boss Tanaka sequence and the casting of Sakichi Sato as Charlie Brown, Ichi the Killer is that rare film which functions as a transgressive endurance test and a richly detailed character driven critique of our own unspoken bloodlust.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki