I
love Takashi Miike! I love spaghetti westerns! I love the jidaigeki film! When word started percolating the cult
Japanese filmmaker would be unifying the disparate genres together into his
sprawling epic Sukiyaki Western Django, I was elated. Featuring a strong ensemble cast of
characters including a bit part by none other than Quentin Tarantino, on paper
this sounded like an inspired tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek ultraviolent
hit. Mixing in everything from Sergio
Corbucci’s own Django to Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name Trilogy and
even Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Miike’s film was shaping up to be an
instant modern classic with a unique spin on the spaghetti western tropes.
Then,
as with the director’s infamously banned short segment Imprint from the Masters
of Horror television series, all the actors start speaking in broken
English with thick, heavy accents with spoken dialogue that doesn’t match the emotion
of the performance. Though some have read
it as a loose play on the nature of Italian overdubbing prevalent on spaghetti
westerns, in practice Miike all but breaks the legs of the film before they try
to stand upright. Save for a few
inspired moments, clever send-ups of the genre expectations and the director’s
own trademark brand of sadistic violence, somewhere along the way something
happened that’s never happened to me before watching a Takashi Miike film: I
lost interest.
Every
dollar is on the screen in Sukiyaki Western Django with beautiful 2.35:1
cinematography by Toyomichi Kurita and longtime Miike composer Koji Endo’s
distinctly spaghetti western score replete with whistling is a glorious
listen. The screenplay itself co-written
by Miike is as dense and convoluted as anything to come out of the spaghetti
western genre or the yakuza genre for that matter. Outside of familiar iconography including the
thick overcoat of Django, action sequences that feel like a dress rehearsal for
13 Assassins and the western/mountainous setting, Sukiyaki Western
Django simply fails to take off and kept proceeding onward until it ended.
While
viewing the film hasn’t diminished my admiration for Miike’s still involving and
ever evolving filmography, this is unquestionably the director’s worst
film. Even after trimming twenty minutes
off of the film for international consumption (I myself watched the full
Japanese cut included on the disc), Sukiyaki Western Django is dead on
arrival. What could have and (considering
the talent involved) should have been great tragically is an ambitious
misfire. Miike would move on from this
mess and continue producing offbeat and difficult-to-categorize genre pictures
but for many Miike disciples Sukiyaki Western Django is unfortunately
the point where many understandably jumped ship. Unquestionably the low point of the great
director’s career.
--Andrew Kotwicki
