Ichi the Killer - Director's Cut

Rating:
Summary: The Benchmark and Genre Definer
Review: Enough said. Please, all you filmmakers out there--make more movies like this. Rather than list the elements, let's just say that any piece of sight, sound, context or content that could be addressed in any meaningful way by Dr. Phil gets dropped from the movie. Dr. Phil would be lost in this movie. I felt safe at last.

Rating:
Summary: Prefigures Biotech Future
Review: Everyone's already said a lot about this movie, so I'll just add one thought: on a certain interpretation (and like all of Miike's films I've seen, this film's ambiguous ending makes it very hermeneutically "open"), the gratuitous violence and the psychologically-implausible fearless perversity of the Ajno clan leader acquire a raison d'etre in the prefiguring of subjectivities -to-come in a biotechnological future where the body is just another repairable, extendable and upgradable technology. IOW, Cyberpunk via De Sade. . .

Rating:
Summary: You always hurt the Ones you Love
Review: "Ichi the Killer" is a cinematic tone-poem to ultraviolence, a sleek red-hot super-sized serving of cinematic slaughter and winking nihilism that, in a supreme credit to its creator Takashi Miike, persuasively advances the argument that bloodletting can indeed be a thing of sublime beauty.

Whatever you think about Japanese uber-director and cinestylist Takashi Miike---cinematic God-Emperor, criminal mastermind, visionary, genius, madman, pornographer, sadist, lunatic---you have to admit four truths about him hold: 1) he's fearless; 2) he's prolific; 3) he doesn't skimp on the special sauce; and 4) within about 2 minutes you can figure out if one of his masterworks is going to exceed your personal puke threshold. It's all about setting realistic expectations.

Take "Ichi the Killer" then: 'Koroshiya 1' is its Japanese title, 'Ichi' being Japanese for "Number 1" and 'koroshiya' meaning "killer", the title reading effectively "Number One Killer" and the correspondent Japanese ideograms rising up in bas-relief constructed from the eponymous idiot-savant [...] own seminal juices that form the film's opening credits (NOTE: you must watch "Ichi" in the original Japanese with English subtitles, or you're just wasting your time).

Within the first iconic five minutes of this thing, you'll know whether "Ichi" is for you, and---coincidentally---you'll also have pretty much all the plot the movie has to offer. Things are already wrong in the techno-neon glittering sprawl of Tokyo's crime-infested Shinjuku district, where a Yakuza clean-up team has been dispatched to scrub the site of the [...] Ichi's latest killing.

Ichi, evidently, is not a believer in the "Clean Hit". The team has to wear bio-hazard gear, industrial booties, and goggles to enter the once sleek apartment of top Tokyo crime boss Anjo, which the still unseen Ichi has turned into an abbatoir festooned with the crime-lord's body parts: the walls still run slick and wet with blood, and intestines are tossed about on the expensive furniture like plump red sausages.

Soon enough Anjo's loyal thugs show up, lorded over by his deputy, lover, top [...] and all-around hipster Kakihara (played to the acid-envenomed hilt by Tadanobu Asano, who owns this movie), whose battle-scarred face looks like a Tokyo streetmap. One of his opponents has thoughtfully expanded Kakihara's mouth by about three inches; he holds it together with two little hoop earrings, and when he takes a philosophic drag on a cigarette, smoke vapor trails out through his flayed cheeks. But the clean-up crew has been thorough: not a trace of Anjo is left, the Yakuza decide the Big Boss is missing along with 100 million Yen, and Kakihara is determined to find him.

Seconds later---and mind you, this all occurs in the film's first few minutes---we catch a glimpse of Ichi, avidly watching a brutal rape through apartment blinds and enjoying himself.

Squeamish? Then you've probably already checked out. Otherwise, turn off any moral faculties you possess and enjoy a visually kinetic, insane, brutal little travelogue through Hell.

This is what "Ichi the Killer" is about: brutality, butchery, rape, massive atrocity, torture, murder, degredation, and high good humor and insane dollops of style. Oh, and something about a gang war. Kakihara is all kinds of cool, the film's Crawling King Snake: he struts about in his platinum punk hair and leather trenchcoat exuding malice, serenely and maliciously presiding over his doomed victims like one of Hell's more stylish demons.

On the other side we have the character of Ichi (Nao Omori). I found Ichi annoying at first: when he's not flying through the air and slicing his victims into sushi with his razor-blade track shoes, he's writhing on the ground in angst-ridden torment and crying like a little girl. Hell, sometimes he flies through the air, blades a-twitching for fresh meat, crying all the time.

And that, precisely, is what makes him fascinating and terrible: Ichi is a monster. He's an automaton, once taunted at school, now working a wretched job as a short-order cook and snivelling pathetically for time off (to go slaughter Yakuza, which he's ordered to do by the mysterious JiJi, who issues his Manchurian Candidate-esque orders over the telephone): Ichi is what would happen if you spliced the genes of Bob Cratchit and "Taxi Driver"'s Travis Bickle. Brrr.

Miike is not a simple director, and thus, delightfully, "Ichi the Killer" is not a straightforward revenge flick. Kakihara is professionally and personally dedicated to destroying Ichi, but he is perversely fascinated by and attracted to him as well. Ichi, when not traumatized and crying or razoring to pieces some unfortunate Yakuza, is likewise drawn to Kakihara: indeed, the two orbit each other, like tiny ferociosly violent little planets, spiralling closer and closer to some orgasmically apocalyptic collision.

And apocalyptic is what you get. That's really what "Ichi the Killer" is all about: there is no sub-text, no ur-message, no wry social commentary here; I truly believe Miike has painted a compelling picture of highly stylized nihilism on his blood-spattered canvas, something the happy Droogies from "A Clockwork Orange" would instantly recognize as a little of the old ultraviolence.

People are not simply 'killed' in "Ichi": they are galactically ripped apart; raped and squished; stomped on and exploded; suspended from the ceiling from fish-hooks, from which position they can be flayed, boiled alive, or treated to tiny little needles being shoved through their tongues and eyeballs. Faces are ripped off, sliced in half, and slither/slide down the walls of countless rooms turned, by Ichi and Kakihara's magic, into charnel houses. It's all movingly beautiful, surprisingly repulsive, and highly addictive. Even the theme is simple and stark and beautiful, a little riff that calls to mind the old spaghetti western anthems of Ennio Morricone (fittingly, Kakihara's cell phone ring tone is the movie's theme).

I have written before about the viral quality of much of the best Asian horror, and "Ichi the Killer" is no exception. If there is such a thing, "Ichi the Killer" itself is a pure chunk of evil, highly toxic and contagious. You don't want to look but you have to watch, and the price of watching is having to replay the scenes on your closed eyelids long after the final credits have rolled---and being happy to do it. You are arrested, halted, infected, probably fatally compromised. "Ichi the Killer" is genius masquerading as virus.