Full Metal gokudô

I've already seen Takashi Miike's 'Fudoh: The New Generation', 'Visitor Q' and 'Ichi The Killer' so I'm prepared for just about anything from this amazingly prolific and eclectic director. But as 'Full Metal Yakuza' is an early Miike movie, made with a small budget for the direct to video market, I expected it to be a throwaway action comedy with little evidence of Miike's future brilliance. However, much to my delight, it actually still managed to surprise me, and despite being a cheap riff on 'RoboCop' (one of my all time favourite movies) Miike doesn't play it safe, and you can see bits of 'Ichi the Killer' in there waiting to burst out. This was Miike's twentieth(!) movie give or take, and despite having already released his breakthrough film 'Fudoh' it was still a long way before he was to be discovered by Western movie buffs in a big way. Miike was mainly working in the direct to video market which at the time gave film makers a lot of creative freedom if they made low budget genre movies that were able to sell a few thousand copies. He certainly took advantage of that freedom as the movie mixes silly comedy, bloody fight scenes, tacky special effects and costumes with a brutal gang rape sequence which Hollywood action directors just couldn't have gotten away with. Miike says he wanted the audience to be confused in how they were supposed to react and I think he succeeds big time! There are a few familiar faces in the cast from other Miike movies and those by Beat Takeshi and Shinya Tsukamoto, but the star Tsuyoshi Ujiki was unfamiliar to me. In Japan he is best known as a rock star with Kodomo Band. Uliki plays Hagane a bumbling low level yakuza who is killed when he gets caught in an assassination attempt on his boss whom he worships. But in fact Hagane doesn't die, he is resurrected by an eccentric scientist who has created a new body for him made out of a combination of metal and spare parts supplied from his dead boss! The rest you just have to see to believe. Hagane is far from your typical Yazuza tough guy, and in many ways you can see his character as being a dummy run for Ichi. 'Full Metal Yakuza' isn't quite as amazing as 'Fudoh' or 'Ichi' but it's still pretty out there and highly recommended to fans of extreme Asian action.

Seriously, its worthy of a Something Awful or iMockery skewering. I can only assume that this movie was supposed to be a black comedy, made to seem cheesy on purpose ala Troma. However this just ended up being bad. Not like a 'so bad its good' kind of bad. More like a 'Please God, make this movie stop' kind of bad. I mean I 'got' what Miike was trying to do. This was supposed to be some unholy combination of a yakuza film and the imagery of a kitschy Japanese 70's beat-em-up serial. Complete with bad costumes, writing and sound effects. This train wreck of a movie finally hits rock bottom in the final moment, which MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. I mean as horrible as the rest of the movie is you can understand what is going on. Then they drop that one on you and the film ends with you wanting to kill someone.

Not all that entertaining, and very low budget, but flashes of Miike's wacky brilliance make this worth seeing for fans of his work. A wanna-be yakuza loser bumbles his way through the lower echelon unpleasantness of a gang, before a very unpleasant incident results in his being transformed into a deadly (if goofy-looking) cyborg fighting machine. Will he get revenge or will he just mope around like some whiner from a French movie and short-circuit in the rain?

People familiar with Ichi will see a lot of the same elements (though Ichi does come from different source material). The protagonist of FMG is a proto-Ichi in many ways, full of angst and completely dysfunctional, stalking around in a plated body-suit and not much of a hero. Any serious pathos or plot development is undercut by the wacky joke bits Miike throws in (like our hero learning stances to deflect bullets). The silliness is definitely fun, but the movie is so schizophrenic that most of the enjoyment is of the "Whoa! Did that just happen?" variety. Dig in if you're a Miike fan, otherwise don't start here.

Takashi Miike may well be the savior of modern cinema - more than any other film maker I'm aware of, Miike keeps pushing the boundaries of the art form. He's also got a deliciously sick sense of humour.

Full Metal Gokudo is an early Miike movie (with the rate he produces movies, even 5 years ago is a long way back in his career). It's a made for video ultra-cheapy, probably made in a couple of weeks for a few thousand yen. The basic premise is Robocop meets a Yakuza movie... producing the Full Metal Gokudo himself, a low ranking Yakuza gangster whose body is reanimated by a self-proclaimed genius scientist, to be a crime fighting superhero. Though things don't quite go according to his plans.

Despite the very very low budget and terrible special effects, FMG contains buckets of that Miike imagination and intellect. Subtle, dark humour occasionally gives way to comic absurdity - and occasionally to something much darker and more disturbing. Nothing as sick as you will find in Ichi The Killer or Fudoh, but enough to trouble the more squeamish viewers no doubt. There's a little bit of a heart in the movie too though, for the viewer who can look past the gore and idiocy.

Mostly though, FMG is just a silly comedy. It takes a bunch of mostly loathsome characters and puts them in a ridiculous situation, then has fun seeing how everybody reacts. It's a movie that could only have come from Japan, and probably only from Takashi Miike himself. The ultra low budget means its never going to get mainstream popularity, but it's the perfect material to become a lightweight cult classic.

It is tiresome enough when so-called "professional" critics drag a film over the coals for not being an exact match to other work by the same director. It is oh-so-much worse when the same is done by amateurs who don't even know the full output of the filmmaker under this type of dissection.

With splashy films like Ichi, the Dead or Alive series, and The Happiness of the Katokuris having reached these shores and found their audience, the smaller films have started to tag along. Visitor Q and Audition have been highly praised by many, but these low-budgeters were made after Miike had gotten his quirkiness shaped into a formula. A great formula, in my opinion, but a formula nonetheless.

There are many more early films by Miike headed this way, and many of these, I suspect, will be much like Full Metal Yakuza -- stories told in a straight-up style with a view for pleasing an audience, rather than a cult.

While it is no "American Cyborg," FMY is a rip-snortin' 100% straight-to-video exploitation venture by a skilled filmmaker who manages to more than meet the requirements of the genre. The story concerns a Yakuza who awakes from what had seemed to be certain death to find that he now has a body that is partially steel, partially his own, and partially made from the parts of his dead sempai...can you guess? Yes, we are going to have a revenge tale. And, as silly as it is, it's a lot less goofy (and will no doubt age better) than that overpraised pastiche of revenge tales, Kill Bill.

Grab a six-pack, pop some corn, and forget about meaning while Uncle Takashi spins what is without doubt the best scifi Yakuza tale of the 20th Century.