Take the most famous Japanese director working today, throw in an almost-exclusively Asian cast delivering all their dialogue in English, set the film somewhere near the Nevada-Utah border, top it all off with a dash of Quentin Tarantino, and what do you get? What you get is Sukiyaki Western Django, only the most highly entertaining (if totally un-marketable) Western epic in years.
Director/cult auteur Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer) has said that all his films revolve around two central themes: fear of death and what motivates someone to continue living. Even if you spent a great many hours dissecting Sukiyaki Western Django, his latest and perhaps oddest film, you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who’s afraid to die or is looking for motivation to go on living. In fact, just about every character seems to have a death wish. This isn’t such a bad thing, though, as this ode to spaghetti Westerns packs quite a punch, delivering plenty of what Miike fans and Western fans are used to: a hail of bullets, scads of blood, a couple of double-crosses, and loads of violence. It’s a simple story, really: two warring factions, the Reds and the Whites (or the Heikes and the Genjis), are holed up in a small border town hunting for a legendary hidden treasure when a lone gunman rides into town promising to help the highest bidder. The few locals remaining in town are torn between the two clans and pretty much just want them to leave, especially Ruriko (who happens to be a famous assassin-in-hiding named Bloody Benten) and the young boy in her care, who was born of a forbidden love between a Genji and a Heike. Of course, the stranger has his own agenda for coming to this particular town at this particular time. And thus the stage is set in this all-too-familiar plot – think Kurosawa’s Yojimbo or Leone’s Fistful of Dollars.
Although he’s mostly known for his J-horror output, Miike is a director who loves to genre-hop, and his use of vivid colors and lush cinematography are a great fit for a Western film. Why the director chose to include an introductory scene featuring Quentin Tarantino as a gunslinger introducing the story remains a mystery, though. The scene looks like a stage play and is poorly acted (QT is no master thespian, to be sure), and it only serves to take away from the quality of the rest of the feature. A short voiceover to begin the film would have sufficed. However, the rest of the cast, despite an obvious struggle with dialogue in a language foreign to them, deliver solid performances all around, especially Yusuke Iseya (Blindness) as Yoshitsune, the leader of the Genji who is as adept at swordplay as he is at gunslinging.
The DVD features an excellent 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio perfectly suited to the scenic vistas of a Western film, and a crisp and clear 5.1 digital surrond sound audio that really plays with your head during the gun battles. Bullets firing from beside and behind you, ricochets off of the buildings to your left, etc.
Special Features:
– There is an informative 52-minute making-of featurette that delves into various aspects of making the film, including the reasoning behind having the mostly Asian cast deliver their lines in English.
– A selection of deleted scenes that disappointingly offer no insight into why they were left on the cutting-room floor.
– A sizzle reel and theatrical trailer for the film that are both quite entertaining.
– The inexplicable inclusion of “Selected Clips” which amounts to nothing more than a Cliffs Notes version of the film, focusing on the more absurd scenes as well as the violent ones.
– Previews of other Seville Pictures films, including the excellent Spanish horror film [REC], the movie that was remade in North America as Quarantine.
Clearly, there can be not other reason for the inclusion of Quentin Tarantino other than it was a stab by Takashi Miike at garnering some publicity for his film in North America. It’s uncertain whether this was necessary, though, as Sukiyaki Western Django was already pretty much guaranteed to go down as a cult cinema classic, especially for Miike and Western fans; its many festival accolades can attest to that.
