News of a new Takashi Miike movie is hardly surprising to followers of the Japanese filmmaker’s long and fecund career. Yakuza Apocalypse combines the yakuza and vampire genres, and has been described by the provocateur as “a rampage back to the basics!”
The adjective “prolific” pops with frequency in profiles of the 55-year-old director and occasional actor but does not quite capture the pace at which he works. Miike has been known to average between five and seven films across genres (extreme action, horror, yakuza, samurai, comedy, family dramas) in a single year, and some of them are counted as modern masterpieces. Consider 2001, in which Miike made Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q alongside five other movies. Non-Japanese audiences can barely keep up with his output, and the odd title is lobbed every now and then into the film festival corner, such as the recent Wara No Tate (Shield of Straw) and Over Your Dead Body.
Miike’s flamboyance and chutzpah burst onto the global stage eight years after he started making features. Audition, his psychological shocker about a widower’s doomed dalliance with a mysterious and possibly deranged young woman, was one of nine films made in 1999. The year included Dead Or Alive, the first of a trilogy starring the pulp-faced Riki Takuechi and the impossibly relaxed Show Aikawa. As genre films go, the plot is basic: Takuechi is a gangster who wants to take over, but Aikawa’s police detective isn’t going to let him.
Dead Or Alive works perfectly as an introduction to Miike’s visual imagination, mischievous treatment of genre elements, and unmistakable empathy for his characters. The movie opens with a spectacular attack-on-the-senses montage of drug-taking, striptease, copious noodle consumption, gay sex, and gun battles. Among this unmatched sequence’s highlights is a line of cocaine nearly as long as the Great Wall, just one of many witty visual gags in a movie that is otherwise dead serious about the consequences of gang warfare.
As Takuechi’s Ryuuichi and his cohorts attempt to wrest Tokyo from a sadistic yakuza boss and Aikawa’s noble detective Jojima balances work pressure with domestic tensions, Miike churns out one gruesome set-piece after another, including one of the sickest torture scenes in the genre and an apocalyptic climax that comes without warning.
The movie often slows down to consider the private lives of its two opposing protagonists. Ryuuichi is a criminal because he has to educate his younger brother, while Jojima’s daughter is suffering a life-threatening disease that requires expensive treatment. Just when Dead or Alive threatens to be sliding into self-pitying mode, Miike abruptly inserts scenes of sadistic violence and perverse humour. The nihilistic ending to beat all endings is a literal and metaphoric blast that contains Miike’s biggest kick in the teeth of genre restrictions.
