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 A "bumbling gangster" gets killed and finds out that "it's the best thing that ever happened to him!" They say he gets rebuilt as something called a "super-robo yakuza." You can also look at Artsmagic's press release here. 1997, 103 minutes, Widescreen DVD
The premise is simple enough: mobster doublecrossed by fellow mobsters gets killed, rebuilt as a cyborg and returns to wreak havoc on those responsible for his death. As director Takashi Miike (Audition, Sabu) notes in an interview contained on the DVD, it was really so simple a premise that it wasn't conceived by a screenwriter, director, or even a money-grubbing producer, but by a property guy that worked at the studio! I guess in between this guy dry cleaning the Godzilla suits and polishing up the samurai swords, he was furiously scribbling ideas down such as the fact that the cyborg would have a really big dingus and that after the cyborg's sort-of girlfriend got kidnapped and raped by Yakuza guys, she bites her own tongue off and dies, but one of the Yakuza guys still goes to town on her anyway! After reading this dude's script, would they have really felt comfortable letting this guy anywhere near a nail gun?
Despite the "why didn't I think of it" genius of combining the Yakuza genre with the Robocop genre, as well as the presence of Miike, a director that usually is able to grab your attention regardless of what the story he's telling is, Full Metal Yakuza is a cheap looking and feeling, empty bore. As it unfolded, I kept waiting for one of those moments where the movie veers off into some direction I hadn't anticipated, especially once it looked like the cyborg was going to complete his revenge about halfway through the movie. I thought that Miike had something extra up his sleeve and would try to do something with the Full Metal Yakuza (FMY) character beyond just making him a guy bent on revenge. Otherwise, we're just left sitting through the movie waiting for the inevitable confrontations with whatever bad guys he hasn't killed yet.
I suppose that waiting around for more violence wouldn't have necessarily been a bad thing, if Miike hadn't been so hampered by the meager budget. The lack of money shows up everywhere here, from FMY's costume (basically a shirt that had some metal parts stitched to it), to the nonexistent lighting in many scenes, to some of the badly done special effects (a scene where a guy's severed head flies through the air unfortunately comes immediately to mind), to the off-putting acting, particularly that of FMY himself as well as the mad scientist that builds him. Probably not related to the poor budget are the failed attempts at comedy. At least, I'm going to give Miike the benefit of the doubt and assume that some these things are intended to be funny and aren't just so-bad-they-look-like-lame-comedy-bits stuff (the defensive dance maneuvers FMY is taught by the scientist and the deal with FMY having a big ding dong for example).
The movie begins with FMY (he probably had a different name before he got turned into Robocrook) being a raw recruit into the Yakuza. FMY idolizes a guy named Tosa who is a big wheel in the organization and Tosa notices this and gives him his wallet and tells FMY to look after his family for him while he's gone. Tosa is going to be gone because he takes on about ten other mobsters in a good old fashioned street fight wielding only a sword and proceeds to hack and slash his way through his rivals, including whacking off the arm of one guy, all in front of his girlfriend! Like most self-centered gals, she sees him doing all this and calls him an animal right to his blood-spattered face! You'd think that she'd be a little more supportive of his employment, but not little miss priss!
Seven years go by and we see FMY still hard at work in the Yakuza. Despite the leg up Tosa gave him all those years ago, FMY hasn't really been able to achieve the sort of success he was probably hoping for. He's a flop at trying to collect money from elderly merchants and is busted back down to cleaning mob toilets. Even worse, FMY is having problems in the bedroom! Naomi, the hooker he's in love with berates him for being a worthless lover which earns her a slap across her face. That earns FMY some cussing from her and the next thing I know FMY is in a park getting his ass whipped by a group of young punks. If ever there was guy in need of being rubbed out and rebuilt as a killing machine, it's this guy.
It's right about this time that Tosa is set to be released from prison (seems like a bit of a light sentence what with the multiple murders and dismemberings, but maybe he had a lot of good time credit) and this only stokes the tension within the organization as to who will be its leader. The forces opposed to Tosa set him up and waste him and FMY. (He apparently missed the meeting where it was decided that Tosa's number was up.) When FMY wakes up, he's in a grungy lab and sees among other things a bathtub full of body parts. He also discovers that he has some new powers, including a big schlong (thankfully, he never gets around to using that particular super power in this movie), the ability to run really fast, super strength, and invulnerability. Leaving the deserted lab, he ends up back in the park where he got beat down by those punks. They're still there and this allows him to test out his powers and get a good start on getting his revenge.
Following his brawl, it starts raining and FMY short circuits. He wakes up back in the lab and this time the mad scientist who built him is present. This allows us to get the backstory on what happened to FMY and how he came to be. The mad scientist is building cyborgs and he bought FMY and Tosa's bodies and combined their various body parts along with metal pieces to make the low budget battlebot we see before us today. That's pretty much the explanation. There's no attempt to justify how one guy operating in a dumpy lab could create artificial life, but then again Dr. Frankenstein was able to do it with a thunderstorm and a moron assistant, so who knows, right? Mad Scientist explains that FMY also has super powered eyes and hearing. This comes in handy when FMY hears his buddy humping his true love hooker and they're making fun of him! FMY doesn't do much of anything about that beyond sulking though, but he's got a bunch of other mobsters to kill, so he probably figures his plate is already full enough.
After an initial confrontation at a driving range (huh?), FMY moves on to bad guys' HQ and kills a bunch of people there, before somehow being talked out of wiping out the last guy by an old buddy of his. FMY then decides to retire to the beach and read. Seriously. The guy is living out in a tent along the ocean next to a grave site. He just lays around eating nuts and bolts out of a bowl while perusing some penetrating text on the meaning of life or some Astroboy manga or something like that. (FMY only eats metal now - this provides the movie with one of its more amusing scenes where when he first learns of his new food of choice we see him dipping a bicycle chain into some milk before eating it.) Then, into this blissful state of existence comes a woman!
She's there to visit the grave that's near FMY's tent and it turns out to be Tosa's old girlfriend and the grave turns out to be Tosa's. What a coinky-dink! She and FMY strike up a friendship and she is somehow reminded of Tosa by FMY and immediately falls in love with him. For his part, FMY is likewise smitten, but is torn by the fact that he's a hideous machine. Well, sure, but don't forget that you're a hideous machine with a oversized ding dong! Your little lady is liable to overlook a little thing like the fact that you eat silverware instead of eating with silverware, if you're Full Metal Yakuza downstairs (if you catch my meaning).
This downtime for FMY was the most intriguing part of the film for me. The potential is there for a fair amount of involving drama. If he loves her, who is it that loves her exactly? Is it FMY or is it the parts of Tosa that he has inside of him? Or does it even matter? And how is her love for him affected when she finds out what he is? And how would a relationship between a retired mobster robot and a retired mobster's moll work exactly? Would they just be content to live out their lives in a pup tent on a beach or would they attempt to make a go off it in the "real" world? For a moment I thought Takashi was onto to something fresh since he seemed to be setting up some new plot twists (especially with the mad scientist back in his lab trying to create a woman cyborg), but sadly, this is all just filler between FMY's new girlfriend going on her own rampage in an effort to get revenge once she finds out who killed Tosa. She's foiled in her effort, kidnapped, and is abused in some rather completely gratuitous scenes that seemed more at home in one those "adult" videos that uncle of yours who lives by himself has delivered to his anonymous rented mail box on the other side of town, rather than in a cheesy action picture.
Naturally, this prompts FMY to go on a final crazed rampage that ends with a guy getting chopped in half and with the mad scientist flashing us. I wasn't entirely sure what that was about, but I was glad that Takashi or the Japanese censors or whomever had the good taste to digitally obscure the details for us. It was all rather predictably tiresome and while the spurting blood and occasionally chopped off limbs were a welcome breath of life in an otherwise uninvolving effort that looked every ounce its cut rate straight to video origins. To their credit, Artsmagic's DVD is amply supplemented (as is always the case with their releases) with a number of interviews with Miike, the editor, and one of the stars as well as filmographies, biographies and a commentary track. The only problem with any of this is that the movie is so lacking, you'll have very little desire to relive any of it as soon as it finally finishes. Frankly, I found the commentary by Tom Mes to be best part of the disc, with his wide ranging knowledge of the cast and Japanese film industry, though I think he enjoyed the film a lot more than I did. But who are you going to believe? Me? Or Tom Mes who wrote Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike, which is universally recognized as the definitive book on Takashi Miike?
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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