ICHI THE KILLER

1998

Directed by Takashi Miike

A.K.A. The beauty of pain

Plot Well. Director Miike packs so much into the tight two hours of this movie (as he has in other cases, such as Dead or Alive) that a summary would be near impossible, and take longer to read than to actually watch the film. What I can do is attempt to paint an accurate picture of this masterpiece nonetheless. First, let's get an idea of the style of the director himself. The man is clearly an autuer in the fullest sense of the word. Like John Ford had his westerns, and Roman Polanski had thrillers that explored complex, unstable minds; Miike has mind-bending Yakuza films. Miike has worked in other genres, but this is his real oevre. Miike is also infamous for almost always going as extreme as possible, not only pushing the envelope, but tearing it up and throwing it away and pretending there never even was an envelope. Then blowing up the post office. This film is an exemplary display of this trait. The gore is so superfluous that it becomes both comedic and poetically beautiful. There's enough fake blood in this film to easily fill an olympic sized swimming pool. The best way I can think of to give a proper understanding of the film is to list only a scant ammount of plot, and instead breakdown a list of the important characters in the film: Firstly, we have the Anjo clan, which is a Yakuza group, comprised most importantly of the following: There's Anjo, the leader of the group. Though he is talked about often as a master at giving pain, we won't see much of him, as he's killed at the beginning. But the clan doesn't know this. Then there's Kakihara, The real lead of the film, and Anjo's right hand man. Kakihara is a man obsessed with the pleasures of pain, enjoying being on the giving end almost as much as he revels in the recieving end. His cheeks are sliced at his lip line, piercing the corners of his mouth to hold his jaw shut. He keeps friends that are almost as sick as him, including a pair of identical twins that are sadistic killer cops. Anjo has an exotic half-Japanese, half-American girlfriend named Karen, who speaks in a distracting method of switching languages mid sentence frequently. She also has a thing for S&M, and plays by her own agenda through the course of the plot. Finally, there's Kitano, a man with horrible luck. He was once a cop, but lost his job when he lost his gun. Then his wife left him to take care of his only son alone. Then, the Anjo clan were the only people willing to take him in, as they knew he was a rather good marksman. Kitano's luck only gets worse as time goes on. On the other side of the action, there's Jiji, a master manipulator. Not only is he good at hypnotism, he is also able to worm his way right into the midst of his enemies. Though he seems to be setting all the different parties against each other, he apparently has an unspoken grudge against Kakihara in particular. His primary weapon in dealing with the Anjo clan is the titular Ichi. Ichi is an introverted, emotionally underdeveloped young man, with an impressive ability to kick harder than most anyone could even punch, which is aided by ultra sharp blades in his shoes. As Kakihara puts it, Ichi is the "perfect sadist", containing nothing resembling pity or masochism. In fact, acting on his gore-based instincts is the only way Ichi has to find sexual release. Jiji also has a set of "cleaners" working under him to render Ichi's chaos spotless afterwards. jiji uses this routine to take out Anjo himself. Kakihara then goes on a mad search to find his boss, convinced the man is still alive, as he has a small crush on him thanks to the boss' ability to cause great pain. Jiji meanwhile manipulates the Anjo clan, and Kakahara in particular, by posing as a simple informant, and alienates them from the rest of the Yakuza groups. At one point he convinces Kakihara that a sister clan, with no emnity towards Anjo are responsible and have kidnapped the leader, which force Kakihara to do something...unpleasant to their clan leader, putting the whole Anjo clan in a world of trouble in the underworld. Slowly, Jiji tightens his snare, so that by the time Kakihara realizes fully that he's been tricked, he is incapable of escaping the trap set for him, nor the inevitable face off with Ichi, which eh both dreads and pines for, knowing the man's fearsome attributes.

Rating I give Ichi the Killer Five Rotting Shambling Corpses out of Five. I think everyone should see this amazing film. If you think that the gore would turn you off out of squeamishness, I assure you it will be okay. I recently had a litmus test by showing this film to a friend who gets physically ill when I have mentioned things as innocuous as getting blood drawn for medical reasons. There were a few shouts of "EWW!" and "UGGH!" from him, but as I said at the beginning of the review, the gore is so over the top that it becomes cartoonish and funny in its non-believability. This is easily one of my favorite movies of all time. See this film.

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