Yakuza Apocalypse

Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine3.5

ACTION! - KILLER MIIKEI mean, it's certainly a Miike’s movie.Honestly, I don’t know what to say or where to start. It’s a yakuza film. There are vampires. There’s a war. There are some pretty cool fighting scenes, nothing extraordinary, but they are great, namely by The Raid’s Yayan Ruthian in his first acting role outside of his native Indonesia, where he plays Mad Dog......wait a minute?*Google The Raid and look for Yayan’s character name in the films*Hold on, does this take place in the same universe, or was the screenwriter trying to be cheeky and/or meta?Hmm...Anyway, he was great. And the rest of the cast do deliver on the wacky stuff they got to do, which is a lot. Miike's offbeat, off-kilter sense of humor is present, albeit not in its most extreme form. The ending left me both dazzled and confused. Then I remember this is a Miike’s film, and I just shrugged it off. Just like that, Captain dropped suspicious white-ish (?) liquid out of her ear canal. The cinematography is pretty good.All in all, honestly still trying to process what the hell all of this film was. I know a lot of it was pretty cool, and probably I am making it sound weirder than what it really is. I’d say watch it if you are by now accustomed to Miike’s eccentricities.ACTION! - KILLER MIIKETODAY SCHEDULEThis is 40Lion Standing in the WindYakuza ApocalypseAs the gods will

Ian West4.5

Yakuza vampire martial arts Miike jam that gets more insane and less coherent as it goes. The main villain is a martial arts master with psychic powers who wears a giant felt frog costume (BIG MOOD), the guy from The Raid plays an assassin disguised as a nerd, and there’s a fucking weirdo underground knitting circle filled with off the wall characters... Miike being Miike. It’s got its issues but eh, who cares? This was just the kind of absurd genre cocktail that I was in the mood for. Oh yeah, the choreography is great as well.

Mike D'Angelo3.5

64/100[written from Cannes '15 for The Dissolve.]Frankly, it was worth flying to Cannes just to witness the giant frog make an unexpected personal appearance during the closing credits of Yakuza Apocalypse. Takashi Miike’s 257,962nd feature film (this year) received a Special Screening in the Directors’ Fortnight, which basically means that they couldn’t quite justify including it in the lineup proper, but also couldn’t bear the thought of not showing it. I trashed my entire schedule yesterday to accommodate the one and only screening. No regrets. At first, it’s unclear why the movie isn’t called Yakuza Vampire Apocalypse, as the gloriously silly plot kicks off when a newly recruited gangster named Kageyama (Hayato Ichihara) discovers that his boss (Lily Franky, who also appeared in Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister earlier in the fest) feeds on the blood of other yakuza. Vampires, however, turn out to be the most mundane aspect of this batshit-crazy saga, which also features a guy with a turtle shell on his back and a duck’s bill for a mouth; a woman whose brains appear to be leaking out of her ears; a basement full of burly human sacrifices who are learning to knit while they wait for their turn; and a secret message that, when decoded, implores the hero to “STAY FOOLISH.” Meanwhile, all of the characters keep worrying about the impending arrival of some terrifying badass, who finally arrives in the form of a martial artist wearing a huge full-body frog costume—the kind of thing you might see at a theme park. (He can beat the shit out of everyone, but he still needs assistance going up and down stairs.) When the frog showed up in “person” at the end of the movie, he got the heartiest standing ovation I’ve seen at Cannes in years. Yakuza Apocalypse itself isn’t ovation-worthy—“patchy” would be putting it kindly, and two hours of this sort of random nonsense is at least half an hour too much—but it’s Miike at his most gleefully lunatic, and that’s always a hoot and a half. I think I’d have to go back to Gozu (which also played the Fortnight, in 2003) to find a comparable degree of insanity in his oeuvre. But, then, I’ve only managed to see 112,344 of his films so far.