There are basically two types of yakuza movies. One regards Japan’s homegrown gangsters seriously, even romantically, as representatives of a vanishing feudal ethos. Another treats them comically, if violently, as lunkheads with too much testosterone and too few brain cells.
Based on a comic by Ishikawa Ken, Sakaguchi Tak and Yamaguchi Yudai’s Yakuza Weapon is more on the comic side, though the wild-child yakuza hero, played by action veteran Sakaguchi, kicks ass for real — and surreal.
This combination is familiar from the work of Miike Takashi, including Full Metal Yakuza (Full Metal Gokudo, 1997) and Dead or Alive (Dead or Alive: Hanzaisha, 1999). But Sakaguchi and Yamaguchi, who first teamed as actor and director on Battlefield Baseball (Jigoku Koshien, 2003), up the ante in not only punches delivered, rounds expended and bodies exploded, but in their blithe disregard for reality, logic or anything else that gets in the way of non-stop, eye-popping action.
The cause of the on-screen commotion is Iwaki Shozo (Sakaguchi), a gangster-turned-mercenary who is dodging bullets and sneering at land mines in South America when he is called home by the death of his elderly gang boss dad (Maro Akaji).
Once back in Japan, Shozo discovers that Kurawaki (Tsurumi Shingo), a gang boss who was once his father’s top lieutenant, was responsible for his demise. Though vastly out-numbered by Kurawaki’s gang, the Death Drop Mafia, Shozo becomes manically determined to punch, kick and cut through them to extract his revenge.
Taking the gang on nearly single-handedly (his two loyal underlings are comically useless), Shozo comes tantalizingly close to his goal, Kurawaki, but suffers wounds that require extreme — and extremely strange — surgery. He survives, but with an arm that magically transforms into an M61 Vulcan cannon and a knee that conceals a rocket launcher. Transformed into a lethal yakuza weapon, Shozo is ready to take on the world.
Sakaguchi, who shot to cult stardom in Kitamura Ryuhei’s 2003 hit actioner Versus, plays Shozo as a snarling, raging bad-ass who fights as easily as he breathes and shrugs off blasts that would crumple a tank. This caricature of a super-punk may be taken from Ishikawa’s comic, but Sakaguchi gives it substance with his awesome martial arts skills.
Other characters cross Shozo’s path, including Nayoko (Kurokawa Mei), his cute-but-quarrelsome love interest, and Tetsuo (Murakami Jun), a childhood pal turned drug-addled enemy, but mostly he is a one-man army — and Yakuza Weapon is his all-stops-out show.