Ichi the Killer (2001)

Review by Sean Patterson



"Wow, this is amazing! Ichi!"
In the mood for some blood and gore? Something real horrorshow? Ichi is your boy.
When his gang's boss, Anjo, disappears, his bagman, Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), goes on a sadistic rampage to find him. Kakihara needs to find boss Anjo not out of loyalty, but because the boss is the only person ruthless enough to satisfy Kakihara's masochistic needs.
And there you have the theme of the movie. The intersection between sex, violence, rape, murder, and bloody gore.
Of course, we the audience know boss Anjo has been dead since the opening scenes. He and a young hooker had the walls of a hotel suite painted with their blood by a mysterious boy wearing a shock trooper outfit who can't stop crying. This is Ichi (Nao Ohmori), the tormented young man who has been manipulated by an old man named Jijii (Shinya Tsukamoto). In fact, Jijii has been manipulating everyone in the movie, planting false information and playing the Tokyo gangs against one another. When Kakihara learns of his boss' death, he begins searching for Ichi, thinking him perhaps the only person capable of hurting him so good like boss Anjo did.
Sound confusing? It can be, but this isn't even half of it. Ichi seems to confuse masturbation with slicing up people with the razors that protrude from the heels of his special shoes. Severed limbs, uncoiled entrails, decapitated heads, and a river of blood flood the screen throughout the move. I would consider it one of those movies where the gore is so over the top as to be funny (and it is) but the sheer amount is enough to make even the most hardened gore fiend take a deep breath.
Takashi Miike's direction is fun and stylized. The urban setting looks grim, but is surprisingly, thankfully, well lit. The camera is never shy about showing exactly what is happening in a scene, with little subtlety. There is some interesting foreshadowing camerawork as well: long shots up or down the sides of tall buildings or stairwells.
The soundtrack is used to good effect. Rather, the lack of music throughout most of the movie is a good effect. This lack makes what little music there is very powerful. When the techno beats start pumping or strange, experimental sounds slowly invade, it creates a sense of foreboding for the unsettling things that are likely to happen.
The screenplay, or rather the translation of it, is adequate and the dialogue is genuinely funny, but it suffers from a problem many adaptations do, which is trying to shoehorn every bit of the manga into the movie. New characters are still being introduced in the second half of the movie, and while they are interesting (especially the guy with the bear ears) it is clear that their characters have a much grander back story there wasn't time to tell. This makes the movie seem to drag on at the end, and it can be hard to keep the arcs of all the various characters in sight. A better, more ruthless edit could have been more effective.
The CGI is outdated and cartoonish, but fits well with the overall cartoonish nature of the violence.
Viewed as a moral parable, the movie is a nihilistic orgy of S&M depravity. But viewed as a dark comedy, Ichi the Killer is a subtle success.
7/10