Leo Goldsmith: Takashi Miike's "Sukiyaki Western Django"

(With a character named "Bloody Benton" you know I will have to see this film)

Once Upon a Time in the East: Takashi Miike's "Sukiyaki Western Django"
by Leo Goldsmith
IndieWire



...

Takashi Miike's career spans some 40 feature films, twenty direct-to-video releases, a dozen or so works for television, and a stage adaptation of "Zatoichi." He's known to popular Western audiences, if at all, for his excruciating 1999 psycho-horror "Audition." And whereas a lot of Miike's work falls into this genre, just as much falls outside of it or pushes its margins.

2001's "The Happiness of the Katakuris" switches from TV-quality drama to lavish musical to claymation within seconds, and more than one of his films splices yakuza action with J-horror. Much of Miike's most interesting films turn on playful genre-mashing, and "Sukiyaki Western Django," as the title suggests, is itself a hot-pot of styles from Orient and Occident, re-appropriating "Yojimbo" back from the Italians and translating the image of Franco Nero's laconic "Django" icon into that of a stubbly Japanese gunslinger.

It should come as no great surprise that the first person we see onscreen in Miike's new film is Quentin Tarantino, lounging in a patently phony Western sunset landscape complete with cardboard Mt. Fuji and hawk-calls and mission bells on the soundtrack -- it all has the flatness of a David Hockney painting, Soon, with an unlikely swiftness, the paunchy American director gymnastically blows away some menacing Japanese heavies (spraying the two-dimensional backdrop with stage blood), before whipping up the movie's titular dish with a snake egg. This prologue (and Tarantino's campy, barely watchable performance) is mercifully brief, but it establishes the mood of the film: loud, jolly, bloodthirsty, and painfully esoteric.

This is, of course, fanboy country -- even Tarantino's character, Ringo, is a reference to Duccio Tessari's spaghetti western character -- and, once underway, its plot dutifully ticks off shots, archetypes, and scenes from a familiar, if quite thorough checklist. An embattled ghost town, two warring tribes between which Django (Hideaki Ito -- here "the gunman") violently insinuates himself, a tragic hooker with a heart of gold (from whom, rather pointlessly, Django receives a noisy off-camera blowjob), a Gatling gun in a coffin: all pile up perfunctorily with enough blood, guns, and gold to keep things reasonably entertaining.

Read the Rest of the Review