Yakuza tosei no sutekina menmen

Yakuza shady businesses, loyalty, not-so-glamorous side of life, glamorous side of life, money, sex, action, comedy - this movie has it all.

But what I liked the most is not properly depicted yakuza, but also backdrops and atmosphere of bubble Japan era (80's), superb soundtracks and simple but engaging story.

Out of 50+ yakuza movies that I had a chance to watch, this one is definitely among top 5.

Ignore relatively low score. It definitely worth more.

This movie is really hard to review since I am not really able to wrap my head around it.

After getting a good beating after losing at a Mahjong game and not having the money to pay (and it is a "good beating" because the evil Taiwan mafia would have killed him instead of the lovely Yakuza punching bag), our protagonist decides he wants to be a Yakuza. The guy who beat him up will now be his mentor and lives at his house. The Yakuzas wife is not happy because now it seems like they cannot have sex with a stranger in the house. What follows are some weird gags about our Yakuza beginner having problems and strange solutions to collecting money. He is climbing up the ranks, a strange love story that involves a rape scene played for laughs, weird characters all around,...

The tone of the film is very uneven. You never know if this is meant to be a comedy, a self-parody, if they tried to make a real drama and botched it.

It certainly has all the tropes of a Yakuza movie. If Beat Takeshi decided to do one of his Yakuza flicks like "Outrage" but did it in the style of his "Getting Any?!" movie. Just not as funny.

For me it was an incoherent yet somewhat entertaining mess with sunglasses on.