ICHI THE KILLER
by Takeshi Miike
Based on "Koroshiya 1" japanese manga
Starring Tadanobu Asano and Nao Omori
Drama
129 minutes
Cut and Un-cut versions realized (this review is about the latter)
8/10
Takeshi Miike doesn't see himself as a director of action movies. The popular japanese director is already famous for realising five or more movies of great quality every year, this movies, he says, are not about action, they're movies of violence. And this might just be true. Take "Ichi the Killer", for example a movie were entrails fly through the sky followed by members and tons of blood, rapes are a common sight, mutilations are even cosmetic. And this all happens on the context of japanese culture, wich has a lot to say about organized violence, centuries of warfare and organized crime, the bushido, they might teach the western world one thing or two about violence. But every movie of this peculiar director is about more than violence as an object of reality is a social study of how violence disturbs how it affects every layer of the social structure, at least in the Japan that Miike knows.
For starters every Miike movie involves a gang, usually Yakuza, and this one is no exception. One of the main characters, Kakihara, masterfully portrayed by Asano, is the right hand of one of the Yakuza gang leaders, decided to avenge his master after he finds that he was killed. What a character this is, if you want to find a character for wich the maker broke the mold after doing him, then take Kakihara, decided to brake all molds, and not just this one, Miike brings us one of those ultimate unclichéd characters. Kakihara is not ruthless as you might expect, he simply doesn't know what compassion or friendship means, if he's apparently looking to avenge his "beloved" master then you fell in his charismatic trap too. He loves only one thing: pain, pain inflicted on him might be good for his stress levels, but give him some finger nails to pierce or some good ol' human meat to boil alive and you'll know what really excites him. The movie tells us more about him than any other character, and if the movie has a flaw is the quantity of characters in this movie that are simply irrelevant.
Then there's Ichi, which may simply be translated as One. Ichi is a seriouslly mentally disturbed child trapped on the body of a teenager. He plays videogames non-stop on his friends appartment, he cannot find a job (technically he gets fired always), he has a thing with beating womans and raping them and he might explode in a slaughtering rage if you provoque him enough. But not any provocation will do against this rare subject, you've to trigger some old memories about bullies. You see, apparently, for the little that we get through the movie, the poor guy was seriously bullied back in high school, he even has memories of seeing a girl being raped before his eyes... After all these mentally braking experiences he's turned into a killing machine whenever needed, that's when his partner asks him to do so. And he can slice meat and bone like butter with his twin blades concealed on his regular shoes.
What Kakihara doesn't know at the start of his quest, is that his master is already dead, and that the man who killed him, Ichi, is set to kill him one moment or the other. The problem with Ichi is that he's really unpredictable, you may see him as pitty worthy sometimes, or even the rarest case of antiheroic personality, but he might just turn into that natural force wich cannot be stopped. And it happens a lot on this movie, the result is some kind of sadistic black comedy bathed on liters of red blood and guts. Ichi doesn't scream furiously when angry and about to kill, he starts crying and he usually eyaculates (yep), this are all clues that trace us to his past, past that you won't know during the movie, as said, at least not very much.
But that's the violent part, what about the other part? Well the other part are usually analogies, you can see Ichi as a lot of things, one of them is this force of nature that I already told you, or simply a mentally disturbed child with a fetish for running around with a superhero suit and twin sharped blades on his toes. What you get of the movie is your issue, I might tell you that this movie observes violence without prejudice and for that the script and the characters are rewarded with unique, not always good, performances, but the plot is blessed with originality, and there's one or two profound messages about vengeance that I've never heard in other movies, but you have got to like explicit violence and gore, otherwise you'll miss half of the movie's portrayals about violence in japanese culture.
My veredict is that if you can open your eyes for long enough, you'll be rewarded with a deep experience. Deeply disturbing, deeply depresing, deeply enlightning or deeply funny. Also good for otakus.:2thumbsup:
PS: If you actually thought the movie was deeply funny then go to the nearest psychiatrist ASAP.:2thumbsup:
