Full Metal gokudô

Full Metal Yakuza (Full Metal Gokudô) 1997 Not Rated

This quaint little movie is one of the first by infamous Japanese director Takeshi Miike. A director known well in Japan for his work on Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) movies—but well known worldwide for his bizarre and shocking "horror" films. This is one of his unusual combination films. It's a Yakuza story, with elements of horror, science fiction, Mafia pictures, and Robocop.

The story revolves around one of Japan's crappiest Yakuza underlings, who, of course, wishes he was more. The head of his, uh, "mafia gang" has taken a liking to him regardless of his grandiose incompetence. Eventually, both are killed, then rebuilt a la Robocop into: "Full Metal Yakuza!" That's right, they're rebuilt into one mostly robotic super-Yakuza warrior—that's primarily the mind and personality of the wimpy warrior. Complete with appetite for nuts-n-bolts dragging around his gigantic penis. Go ahead, reread that sentence. You read right. The new RoboYakuza eats hardware like nuts, bolts, screws, nails, what-have-you for energy. And, he has a huge wang. Well, anyway, he goes around fighting and killing people that were enemies to him and his Yakuza master before they were killed. So it's a revenge story, too. One with cheesy dialog, rampant violence, amusing characters, and laughably horrible special effects. Movies made for PBS don't often look this bad! But the film is decently fun to sit through, so long as you like cheesy Yakuza movies, constant violence, and Takeshi Miike. But keep in mind, this has exceedingly low production value, and is cheesier than Wisconsin. 5/10

www.ResidentHazard.com

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.

Guess that in potential this could had been a truly awesome and insane revenge flick but the movie instead goes for a more over-the-top and comedy like approach. It doesn't really has the desired effect, since it more often makes the movie just silly instead of entertaining or funny.

Normally I either really love or truly dislike a Takashi Miike movie but in this case I'm stuck in the middle somewhere. I really didn't hated the movie but at the same time was also never impressed- or entertained enough by it.

Because the movie takes a more comedic approach, it's also being a more simplistic one to watch. It's very straight-forward, without any good depth or underlying emotions to the movie its story and themes. It's why the movie feels like a bit of a bland one, as well as redundant, even for the fans of Takashi Miike movies.

For a Takashi Miike movie it also certainly isn't edgy enough. It sounds weird, with all of the violence and gore in this movie but the movie feels quite tame and like it's holding back with its graphic violence. This is something Takashi Miike normally really never ever does! But it's a movie from before the days he became an established name really, so it perhaps isn't so surprising that this movie doesn't feel as edgy and daring as most of his later work.

Another problem I really had with this movie was its story. To say it bluntly; this movie really seems to be a Japanese remake of "RoboCop". It uses a very similar concept and even some of the characters and sequences seem alike. So originality was also a big problem with this movie. And as a matter of fact, it makes the movie even weaker, considering that it isn't even halve as good or half as edgy and daring as Paul Verhoeven's "RoboCop". It makes this movie feel like a bit of a lame rip-off attempt.

But despite all criticism, this is still a movie you could have some fun with. It's definitely entertaining to watch in parts and with a Takashi Miike movie you are always getting something unique and unusual. The movie is still filled with plenty of moments like that. So despite not being to original with its story, it still is at least being original with some of its scene's.

6/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Japanese film maker talent and inventive genius Takashi Miike (born 1960) has done incredible amount of films in his not-even-so-long career so far. He has done made-for-video cheapies and big screen films that vary from unconventional and wonderful Yakuza tales to insane comic book adaptations to mind blowing satires, and the greater the themes in these films are, the more serious he is and uses his ideas and crazy creativity with restraint inside the otherwise serious world he's created: a bazooka torn from a guy's back isn't any funny moment in Dead or Alive (1999) but has its important meaning for the theme telling so much about the character(s) and their values in the violent world Miike depicts.

His Full Metal Yakuza aka Full Metal Gokudo (1997) belongs to the cheap and fastly made video films and it is easy to tell it is a very exploitation oriented market that wants simple, violent and graphic films without much more merits in them. Full Metal Yakuza tells the Robocop-like (1987, Paul Verhoeven) story of a killed Yakuza who gets back to life as he is turned into a robot/human by one crazy scientist. He wants to avenge the death of his friend as well as try to save his former love from the sadistic hands of the rival Yakuza. Ultra violence and gore ensues and all the potential that was used to wonderful perfection in Fudoh (1996), for example, is not there in this film.

There are some nice Japanese cinema elements like the silence that tells more than words. The scene in the beach after a refusal to kill one Yakuza boss is especially memorable and also close to the work of Takeshi Kitano. Still the revenge theme is not handled here as it was in Dead or Alive or Fudoh. In Full Metal Yakuza, violence and acts of revenge don't have any other meaning than to satisfy the gore audience and that is pretty sad for those who'd like to see Miike making more serious cinema all the time. In real world, violence and revenge is never as harmless and fun as in this film and Miike for sure would have talents to make real films from the subject matter, as he's done. Also the ending, showing how desperate the characters are for personal revenge and payback would be as wonderful as in those other films, but now it all is just mostly comical trash as Miike definitely wasn't doing this for anything else than money and to satisfy his huge need to work. It is hard to make any interpretations on single images and scenes while everything before and after them fights against any serious analyzes.

The film is high on its gore level and so reminds pretty much of Ichi the Killer, a film that is filled with cartoonish violence and blood plus sadism towards both females and males. Full Metal Yakuza has plenty of swordfights (!) and other bloody carnage that gives the makers an opportunity to throw in plenty of blood geysirs and splatter that satisfies some viewers but is not enough when the film is by talented director like Miike. Neither this or Ichi the Killer are to be taken seriously (hardly anyone takes, at least Full Metal Yakuza), and especially Ichi, despite its flaws and negative sides, tells something about the audience, that laughs looking like a bunch of monkeys and as sorry characters as those inside the film, when someone's being tortured and brutally murdered. Ichi the Killer has also some interesting elements in the form of Ichi himself, who is a traumatized boy with violent environment and society around him. This important theme is handled more carefully in Rainy Dog and also in Fudoh.