Whether it’s the casual, interspersed slaughter of Dead or Alive and Ichi the Killer or the unsettling buildup to the painful climax of Audition, Takashi Miike’s most seminal films can be broken down into bizarre cycles of exposition and violence. In the aforementioned movies, he cultivates tension and unnerves the viewer for just long enough that when the killing does begin, it’s almost cathartic in its brutality — after all, violence is one of the easiest things to understand.
Miike’s Izo, released in 2004, is this cycle both turned on its head and taken to its extreme conclusion, and as a result, the symbolism is heavyhanded, the exposition is lengthy, the killing is numbingly frequent, and there’s about thirty minutes in total of a guy screaming and playing acoustic guitar.
Izo, ostensibly, is about the titular samurai’s quest for revenge after his feudal-era execution. As ending lives is what he does best, Izo cannot move on to a peaceful afterlife, choosing instead to go on a rampage through time and space, slaughtering everyone in his path until he can kill no more.
The resulting film is messy, jarring and disjointed; its lack of cohesion seemingly deliberate, Miike’s story is kept together more by symbolism than by plot progression. As the plot consists primarily of Izo killing all who stand in his way, the movie has an almost video game-like quality to it, as the adversaries grow increasingly tougher and bizarre and the exposition gets increasingly long and nonsensical. (So, Metal Gear Solid 2.)
Izo the samurai, having transcended death, is effectively immortal, entirely lethal, and almost completely unsympathetic as a character. As such, the visceral rush that would normally come with an on-screen kill is dulled and eventually neutered completely as the fate of everyone Izo faces becomes a foregone conclusion. Throughout the movie, Izo’s defeat is more or less an impossibility, and the resulting payoff of this trait during the ending isn’t worth being deprived of that tension for the entire movie.
Because he will stop at nothing, Izo began to lose his humanity the moment after his execution, and he only degenerates as the movie progresses, becoming a beast (as he throws away all pretenses and indulges his basest urges at a whim), then a demon (literally) as his body count grows. He stones a former lover, has sex with an avatar of Earth’s fertility, and takes a piss on the floor in the presence of monks, among worse things. His actions make his character simultaneously both unrelatable and unlikable, which isn’t good when he is the only constant figure in a parade of disjointed and violent anachronism and juxtaposition.
The themes and violent imagery taken as wholes are nowhere near as stylized as what a Miike fan would come to expect, and sometimes even seemingly border on parody (slow-motion katana bullet deflection, anyone?) However, there are nevertheless a handful of sequences that evoke brilliance in their absurdity.
To list a few from relatively early in the movie:
- Businessman vampires take knives to Izo, who is stuck in a cave wall.
- Izo is propelled from a lake upside-down into the middle of a modern wedding, then has an altercation with the groom. (and yes, the entire scene is like that in the movie)
- Izo cuts his way out of a room full of crying, dishevelled women.
- While in feudal Japan, Izo fights a SWAT team.
Violent scenes aside, there are also some moments that are, for lack of a better term, an utter mindfuck, most notably the classroom sequence and the scene with two simple farmers who are among the few not cut down by Izo. However, for every one entertaining or thought-provoking scene, most scenes that Izo isn’t in (and several that he is) are slow and uneventful, mostly consisting of characters sitting around and talking about what a unstoppable force Izo is. The “antagonist” of the movie, a God analogue, is suitably unsettling and androgynous, though his pet snake overdoes the symbolism just a little. Takeshi Kitano makes an appearance, but he is woefully underutilized as one of the people sitting and expositioning. Bob Sapp also shows up as a monk blocking Izo’s path, and the resulting fight is one of the movie’s best.
And yet, above all, there is one reason why the film drags on: the musical interludes by Kazuki Tomokawa. Whether or not the viewer enjoys his particular style of music, being subject to several of his songs in their entirety over the course of the movie is overbearingly tedious; in some cases, they’re set against stock footage of World War II, and in others, the shot simply consists of him sitting and playing the guitar. While his lyrics are interesting, they are repetitive, and though it’s a product of the medium, reading the same subtitles over and over again strips away whatever effect Miike was going for.
Despite everything, Izo still merits a mitigated recommendation: if the viewer has time to kill (the movie’s over two hours long), a desire to see some Japanese ultraviolence, and no expectations, then the film is well worth a viewing.
For everyone else, the fast-forward button is this movie’s best friend.
