Yakuza Apocalypse Review

A Film With Bite

♦Tripwire’s Contributing Writer Hugh David assesses Takeshi Miike’s new film, gangster vampire mash-up Yakuza Apocalypse…

Yakuza Apocalypse

Prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike, well known to comic-book and videogame fans for his many excellent adaptations (Ichi The Killer, Waru, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Crows Zero, Yatterman, Ace Attorney), has slowed down of late, with Yakuza Apocalypse one of only two films released last year, and an original at that (written by his former assistant director). However long-time fans of the director’s works will appreciate what’s on offer here; the man who once made a prog-rock-opera of a Yakuza story here blends the latter with a vampire tale to great effect.

The film opens in typically frenetic and bloody style, in a scene that feels like the climax of a previous tale where we see the old leader (actor/writer Lily Frankie) of a small-town gang fight his way through a rival gang until his true nature is revealed confronting the pistol-packing leader. The narrator Kageyama (played by the excellent Hayato Ichihara, who has faced undead of a sort previously in his career), a gang member under this undead boss Kamiura, starts to fill in the background for us post-credits while we see him and his colleagues in action, offering justice and some sort of stability in a town suffering the ravages of the changing economics. It’s not enough, however, as crime is as affected by recession as is everything else (except of course the wealthy). Our narrator is taken by his boss to a restaurant where a knitting circle of ex-cons are being trained/tortured by the owner in preparation for the gang leader to feed, and while he has no idea about this he is presented with fresh blood to drink so that he can start to build up a tolerance for it, as the boss clearly intends to “transform” him.

This process is however accelerated by the arrival in town of two comic-book-like characters: a hat-and-cape-garbed man speaking English and wearing a child’s coffin on his back, and a milquetoast type with lethal capabilities (played by THE RAID co-star Yayan Ruhian), both there to establish why the boss left the mysterious Syndicate. Failing to prevent them executing Kamiura, Kageyama is left for dead by them but bitten and turned by the dying severed head of his old boss, heeded to become a yakuza vampire. Out of control and without anyone (yet) to teach him, he tries to stick to his old values but creates a load of new vampires as he feeds, none of whom are Yakuza, and they all enter into conflict with his old gang and their new leader as well as these representatives of a greater order. And all of this is before the “modern monster, the terrorist’s terrorist” arrives in town.

Were it not for the original storyline and present-day relevance, this could well be a Miike Greatest Hits package, harking back very much to his then-ground-breaking Dead or Alive trilogy, borrowing vampirism from the Tennen Shojo Man Next TV series, rendering a hallucinatory sequence in stop-motion, and throwing in the kitchen sink when it comes to ladling on his trademark lunatic flair. Yet it only seems random; there’s a core message underlined more than once about the nature of Japanese society and the relationship between yakuza, authorities and civilians, along with further commentaries on gender roles, Western cultural influences and the like dotted around. All however are subsumed within the overall genre narrative, in which a good man, albeit a Yakuza, attempts to come to terms with his humanity in the face of becoming a vampire and being told he has a destiny, and the sheer uproarious entertainment to be had from the various elements thrown on-screen, including some first-class action. Coming from the 56-year-old director this shows him to be creatively in rude health, and is frankly vintage Miike. Fans will enjoy it; non-fans could do worse than give it a go as long as they can remain open-minded.

HUGH DAVID

Yakuza Apocalypse is out now on DVD and Blu Ray from Manga.

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