Izo

Sometime during the late Endo period, noted samurai Okada Izo is tortured and ritually slain upon a crucifix. His soul does not die, however, embarking on a period hopping journey through space and time. Fueled by bloodlust- and with occasional pauses for philosophical rumination- the vengeful spirit of Izo murders with impunity, slaying any and all who cross his path. Whether or not his appetite for revenge is satiated- and if his soul is cleansed by all the bloodshed- remains to be seen in the strange, stylish thrill-ride that is Takashi Miike's 'Izo.'

An action epic with a metaphysical foundation, 'Izo' is a bloody odd film from a director who specializes in them. Written by Shigenori Takechi, the film has a non-linear narrative structure that jumps through time periods like a springbok, and can be a little confounding and hard to follow. The journey the titular character goes on is intensely violent and frequently exciting, though uneven and imperfect. Throughout the film, thrilling battle sequences are interspersed with plodding, dialogue-heavy scenes that frankly don't work.

While one can appreciate the fact that Takechi and Miike are attempting to add another dimension to the tale, amid the madness of time-shifting, gore-splattered fight scenes, philosophical ponderings are jarring and out of place. The narrative becomes imbalanced, and the film's pacing suffers as well. Which is not even to mention the fact that the philosophy at the heart of 'Izo' is rather shallow and simplistic, and could easily be expressed in a more eloquent, understated manner. Fans of Miike will probably be left a little underwhelmed by the proceedings; some may even be bored.

Though, to repeat oneself, the action in 'Izo' really is pulse-pounding stuff. Expertly choreographed, the battles are fast and frenetic; and will surely have you on the edge of your seat. Federico Benvenuti and Ravindra Pratap Singh Ricky of the stunt team do marvelous work and the displays of swordplay in the film are breath-taking. In fact, the brilliance of the action unfortunately underscores again the deficiencies of the story and dialogue. It's a real shame Miike didn't have a screenplay to work with as strong as the action in his film.

What he does have is an emotive, off-beat soundtrack from Kazuki Tomakawa that is unforgettable and unique. Tomakawa periodically turns up in the film to serenade Izo and the audience, like the minstrels in 'Cat Ballou,' or Jonathan Richman in 'There's Something About Mary.' Tomakawa sounds a little bit like a Japanese Tom Waits, and the intensity and weirdness of his songs and his performance suit the crazed events of 'Izo' perfectly.

The film also boasts stylish cinematography from Nobuyuki Fukazawa, who has for many years worked on the show 'The Woman of S. R. I.' His muted efforts give the film an assured, stark visual style that is arresting and admirable. The set and costume design is also striking, with the titular character's main outfit being especially notable. Additionally, while Yasushi Shimamura's editing is a little loose during the dialogue scenes, he cuts the battles together masterfully; and his work deserves praise.

Also praiseworthy is Kazuya Nakayama, starring as Izo. Nakayama has a strong presence that dominates the screen, and his performance is steady and impressive. He handles himself well in the fight scenes and manages difficult dialogue with a remarkable ease. The character and his motivations may be somewhat recherche, but Nakayama is consistently commendable. His supporting cast are all terrific, but get very little to do in comparison. Kaori Momoi and Takeshi Kitano are particularly good and, though on screen for a short time, leave an indelible impression on the viewer.

At the end of the day, Takashi Miike's 'Izo' is a bit of a mixed bag. Though containing thrilling action sequences that will have you glued to the screen, the dialogue is mediocre and overly wordy. Additionally, the film's philosophical cogitations come across as a little half-baked, and the non-linear narrative structure can be confusing. The film does feature a great Kazuki Tomakawa soundtrack and a strong central performance from Kazuya Nakayama, as well as fine cinematography from Nobuyuki Fukazawa. To cut a long story short, 'Izo' is a film both muddled and memorable; another unique offering from one of the strangest directors in cinematic history.

I was expecting a samurai film, I couldn't have been wronger. It is hard to explain "Izo" with just words, even if I could I don't think it would cover all the things this film has to say.

Before explaining the story of this film I think it is essential to talk about the visual aspect of it. "Izo" looks like another experimental film from the director Takashi Miike, lots of unorthodox camera shots and visual story telling. Acting feels very theatrical... in a Japanese way. There is no stopping in this film, it is a fast ride from start to the end and you have to catch up with it.

As for the story, Izo is the main character in this, a samurai from feudal Japan who apparently had a lot of drama in his life. After his death his tortured soul wanders around modern and old Japan, endlessly taking lives. He denies the existence of God, faces old foes, those who hold grudge against him, sleeps with his mom and kills her, he sees women he had been with, kills them, kills lots of women, kills lots of everything actually. And the whole Japan -modern and old- wants to stop this guy, he is seen as a menace to the system, he doesn't belong to the system. And he travels back and forth in time, fighting and killing everyone that gets in his way, slowly turning into a demon.

There is a lot of defiance in "Izo", against everything human civilization stands for. Its purpose apparently is to question that which made us what we are. Where does religion, law, ethics come from? And it has a very nihilist answer to all of it. While watching this I felt a lot of mythology in it, feels like a Greek or a Persian tragedy.

What I've written might sound non-sense if you haven't yet seen this and have no idea what it is like but this is as much as I can do to explain this film. I think that's what makes good art: It speaks for itself...

Izo is the sort of movie-thing that straddles the line between awesomeness, pretentiousness, and an as of yet unidentified third sector that cannot be described with human language.

So this time-traveling samurai dude kills a ton of people, and along the way this other dude sings nonsensical things for ten minutes at a time while sounding like he's just eaten a cat who was itself gargling nails. There's also some possibly gratuitous nudity and some certainly gratuitous scenes of swords appearing from places where they should probably not appear from.

I only have about half of an idea what Izo is about, but I think it means that Takashi Miike hates everything except slimy grown men being forced out of tiny female orifices at the ends of movies. And personally, I love him for it.

After watching perhaps the most reckless, surreal, mystical-style take on the ultra-bloody grind-house samurai epic, I'm not too sure who is more relentless, its main character- the unstoppable un-dead/spirit Izo (Kazuya Nakayama, likely in the performance of a career, for better &/or worse) or its director Takashi Miike. It's been compared to both Greek mythology and Jodorowsky's El Topo, and I can definitely see credence in both examples. In the first half hour to forty five minutes, actually longer if you account for, um, story, you're not sure precisely what the hell (no pun intended) is going on. Izo, at the start, gets crucified, and then we learn after a while (err, it's pretty obvious) he was quite the warrior and swordsman, who is out for vengeance as he comes back as an un-crushable spirit. Later on, we get a view into what tags along with him, in a female form, as a 'fragment', but for the most part one can only try to assume that Izo is on a collision course to nowhere, a pure embodiment of nihilistic anarchy who could be the Terminator in blood-eyed samurai garb if he/it actually had the mission.

I can't deny that Miike deserves an 'A' for effort on this sort of thing, but it's also the kind of project that veers the closest of all the work I've seen of his so far to that most overused of terms- pretentious (albeit I haven't dug deep enough into his oeuvre to make that definitive). I mean, really, what are we to make of cut-aways at varied, completely random times of newsreel footage of dictators and famous world wars and atom bombs going off in black and white, sometimes in reverse mode, or in sped-up mode? What about a guy who comes in and out of the (very loosely laid) story to do acoustic-guitar musical numbers? It does all connect, I suppose, to the sort of random madness and almost Superman-like ability to not get really that harmed, unless around his quasi-kryptonite of the order of the 'Soul-fragment'. A lot of what ends up popping up as sort of the history of Izo, before he was turned into the ultimate grudge with a sword, would be really interesting on its own, but strung together like this with the rest of the picture made it frustrating for me. Perhaps I wasn't ready enough for all of this, but for all of the virtuosity that Miike is going for with his bloody, full-blown surreal odyssey, only some of it works well while the rest falls into 'huh' mode.

But the rest of this picture is what's almost teasingly ironic about Izo. As a swordplay movie, the kind that delivers the goods on action set-pieces and violence galore, doesn't disappoint, and if anything it shows Miike knows this kind of picture, which is why in a sense he's probably trying to lampoon it underneath the very dark and Gothic exterior. Nakayama is a real force to be reckoned with, and he works well in his all-too-limited role. It's always hard to do variations on the same style of killing- slicing a sword in the blink of an eye, and sometimes seeing the (appropriately) blood-soaked and flesh-torn aftermath, or in an immediate cut-away- and Miike pulls out his entire arsenal of tricks, including a set piece with the one American actor- Bob Sapp- who barely puts up a front either despite his huge size. But even with the creativity in many of Izo's murder sequences jarring and excitingly outrageous, the repetition becomes a little tiresome. And it wasn't that the picture was too confusing, though it does contain that side of the El Topo, where it's basically intentional for it to go in circle's around people's heads.

The messages that barrage the viewer though through the content (like in one scene where Izo is at a school and you-guess-what happens and there are cutaways to classrooms where kids are asked to define 'love', 'nation', and other ultra big words taken for granted) are what become fuzzy or just too off-kilter for their own good. For someone who is usually so sharp on the edge with satire, Miike here is trying to scrape up enough with the action to justify it being there, because, of course, Izo's world is in some otherworldly plain of Greek tragedy, Buddhism, and other factions that are also connected to the true depravities and horrors of the world. But it's too much on one plate, and there's definitely the sense of overload. It's the kind of picture where the director does, more often than not, stumble on his face with his own ambitions; that being said, I'd much rather see a movie by Miike that only reaches up so high to its ideals than for a lesser filmmaker to just churn out typical product. Izo is anything but typical product, and it follows no rules (and destroys much like its character), which becomes part of the problem, at least on a first viewing.

I've seen my share of Lynch, Cronenberg, Tsukamoto, and other Miike films in the past, and I must say for a fact that IZO beats everything else currently out there for extreme bizarreness.

After watching the film for 2 hours, there was still a lot of head scratching from the audience leaving the theater. What did it mean? What exactly happened? What was the purpose? But do you expect any less from Takashi Miike?

As what I gathered, an assassin named IZO is crucified as punishment, from what we don't know, probably a few hundred years ago. His punishment instead goes beyond multiple spearings through his body, but eternal damnation of life, where time, space, and dimension are not clear.

It seems IZO has the capability of traveling through random times and space, but randomly out of nowhere. He kills whoever may be in his path, as they are trying to kill him. The purpose of his eternal damnation is not truly clear and he seeks on a Reason. A Reason in a place where Reason doesn't exist.

Add to the package a Huge body count (not as bloody as you would expect actually), some sex, samurai and cartoonish violence, random old stock footage, zombies, a randomly appearing folk singer giving metaphoric songs on occasion, snakes, caterpillars, and birth itself, it is one unique picture.

Did I get it? Nope. Did I enjoy it? I think I did. A second viewing is what I must give it eventually. 8/10