Yakuza Apoc­a­lypse

Lot’s of peo­ple give Woody Allen shit for keep­ing to his strict sched­ule of one movie per year with­out fail. Maybe if he put the brakes on, allowed an idea to per­co­late and enrich a bit, then maybe his suc­cess rate would be a lit­tle high­er? Or, at least, he might make a movie which didn’t feel like it was punched out to order, or as a way of mere­ly main­tain­ing a per­son­al timetable.

The same could be said of Japan’s Takas­ki Miike, whose pro­duc­tion line style of film­mak­ing means that we get lots and lots of very mediocre movies that make it across the pass – with the odd bur­nished gem such as 13 Assas­sins crop­ping up among the rab­ble as well – and lit­tle in the way of qual­i­ty control.

Yakuza Apoc­a­lypse lives up to its wacky title, but that’s about it. What begins as a rudi­men­ta­ry gang­ster movie set in a small reces­sion-hit town begins to reveal its colour­ful cards as some­thing a lit­tle more cre­ative and arcane. Why are those goons being kept in a base­ment and forced to knit? Why is that Eng­lish-speak­ing monk drag­ging a Djan­go-like cof­fin on his back? Is that nerdy tourist in the high-waste jeans (Yayan Ruhi­an) actu­al­ly that dude out of The Raid 2?

Our dull hero is Hay­a­to Ichihara’s Kagaya­ma, a sec­ond-rung Yakuza enforcer smit­ten by the colour­ful back­piece tat­too of benev­o­lent local boss, Kamiu­ra (Lily Franky), who has to take over the con­cern when he wit­ness­es friend and men­tor hav­ing his head torn off, and then is turned into a vam­pire when bit­ten while inspect­ing the sev­ered noggin.

And from there, all bets are off and egre­gious, tire­some stu­pid­i­ty reigns. Pro­tract­ed mar­tial arts sequences take over, inter­cut with scenes of peo­ple talk­ing in rooms. A man dressed as a giant frog who is billed as the world’s most dan­ger­ous ter­ror­ist enters the fray, which is quite fun­ny for about two min­utes, but los­es its shine after 40.

There are moments where Miike lifts a stock gag to a high­er plateau in the way he films it, such as the moment where the brain flu­id pour­ing out of a woman’s ears pro­duces a mini rain­bow as it flows to the pave­ment. But these moments are few and far between.