Yakuza Apocalypse

Dir: Takashi Miike

2015

****

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the work of director Takashi Miike will know whether or not to commit time to Yakuza Apocalypse but those who like their Miike hits to be more Ichi the Killer than Visitor Q (With an element of The Happiness of the Katakuris) then you should know that it should be next on your watch list. The title doesn't do the film justice, as the film is Miike at his most extreme and surreal, as well as his most playful. It's hard to explain but the story covers different genres with very different tones. Boss Kamiura is legendary in the underground world of the Yakuza, rumoured to be invincible. The truth is that he's a bloodsucking vampire, a secret he has kept hidden for some time, and not even his trusted and most loyal underling Kageyama hasn't been told of his truth. Kageyama is ridiculed by his fellow Yakuza and his loyalty is constantly questioned by his excuse of sensitive skin when asked to adorn himself in Yakuza tattoos as is expected. One day, assassins aware of boss Kamiura's secret vampirism arrive from abroad and deliver him an ultimatum: Return to the international syndicate he left years ago, or die a painful death. Kamiura refuses and, during a fierce battle with anime-otaku martial-arts expert Kyoken, is torn limb from limb, in a gory and bizarre scene, typical of a Miike film. With his dying breath, Kamiura bites Kageyama, passing on his vampire powers to his unsuspecting servant. As he begins to awaken to his newfound abilities, Kageyama's desire to avenge the murder of boss Kamiura sets him on a course for a violent confrontation with Kaeru-kun, the foreign syndicate's mysterious and seemingly unstoppable leader. The film is a contrast of disturbing seriousness, where murder and rape is shown graphically, and absurdist fantasy, where slap-stick fighting go hand in hand with dream sequences and parody. Miike swipes several genres in one go in true Miike tradition, while at the same time creating his own. The story is basic, good but as if it was made up on the spot (and the rate Miike actually makes movies makes me wonder whether it was). It's really the characters and the unbelievably odd scenes that make Miike's films so wonderful, Yakuza Apocalypse being no exception. Miike's eclectic characters are from a mixed bag of genres and make the film what it is. There is a woman whose head is filled with a strange liquid that makes loud noise, an intellectual Tudor gangster who looks and talks like William Shakespeare, an Indonesian martial arts expert dressed as a nerd, a hyperactive kappa goblin and a giant frog that wants to destroy the world (he's just a man in a frog suit in the beginning, then things get weird). It is nuts, not just for the sake of it but for the art of it, Miike is an auteur of oddity, a genius of the bizarre who pushes the boundaries and then makes up new boundaries to push through once he has. Unapologetic, unfathomable, unstoppable and impossible to compare with anything, other than maybe Miike's previous oddities. You will either love it or hate it, I personally love it.