Edge-wise, violence has replaced sex as the last frontier - and Miike Takashi knows it. A self-styled directorial outlaw with super-size ambition, energy and talent, Miike has rapidly upped the violence ante to heights that look, depending on one's point of view, sickening, awe-inspiring or absurd. Despite the hints of fetishism in Miike's work - he has the same kind of thing for body-piercing that Hitchcock had for icy blondes - he has a comic and even humanistic side.
His latest assault on all that's decent is ICHI THE KILLER, a gang thriller based on a cult comic by Yamamoto Hideo. A wimp has transformed himself into a deadly fighting machine, but stokes the fires of rage with tears of remembrance for boyhood humiliations. Though reminiscent of CRYING FREEMAN, a popular manga about a weeping hit man, ICHI THE KILLER adds a new, perverted twist: The hero climaxes each time he kills.
The story starts with a standard-enough gang-movie trope: The boss of the Anjo-gumi and his young lover are murdered, and the survivors, led by Anjo's hot-blooded top lieutenant, Kakihara, boil through Shinjuku in search of revenge. Kakihara pursues his boss's killer with an eerie calm, punctuated by eruptions of fiendishly inventive cruelty. As the body count mounts, we see a showdown coming: Ichi vs Kakihara. The loser, it seems, will not sleep with the fishes, but be pureed into a bloody action painting.
Tsukamoto Shinya and Sabu, both acclaimed indie directors in their own right, are effective in their respective roles, adding a third, human dimension to their manga models. But it is Asano Tadanobu, as Kakihara, who is this extreme movie's grinning malevolent center. Usually cast as a quiet type who seethes with inner fire, Asano plays the flame-haired gang boss with a chilling psychopathic glee.
Mark Schilling