Takashi Miike makes a movie out of a videogame… or is it the other way around?

While Sukiyaki Western Django has been generating more buzz, Miike also debuted this title in 2007.  (By the way, at his current rate of productivity, it’s estimated that Miike will surpass both Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez in all-time homeruns by the 2011 season.)  In adapting a videogame for the screen, the world-class genre auteur faced a question from long-time fans such as myself as to whether his idiosyncratic ways could strike a balance with the demands of franchise-style filmmaking.  Based on viewing Like a Dragon, though, I have to wonder why this was ever in doubt—as with Ichi the Killer (2001), he’s taken an existing property and clearly moved it into a new subdivision in the ever-expanding, ever-exploding Miike-verse.

The final product is yet another example of the director’s trademark versatility, as well as a new entry in his own pioneering guns-and-insanity subgenre:  think of this as Dead or Alive (1999) toned down for an R-rating, if that makes any sense.  Indeed, we get some of the intentionally garish colors and harsh lighting as in Miike’s previous urban crime sagas and of course the same pulpy slapstick, this time with a high-energy metal soundtrack playing over the fight scenes.  However, Like a Dragon is also shot through with more half-hearted romanticism and sentimentality than many prior efforts, or at least more free of the usual counterpoints Miike himself often introduces to undermine these tendencies (e.g., The Great Yokai War, 2005).

To be sure, some of that quasi-pandering emotionalism comes with the territory since Like a Dragon is clearly fashioned on the template of an old style “honorable yakuza” flick (itself a reworking of certain samurai archetypes).  That means we get themes of innocence, repentance, iconoclasm, and the self-deluding nature of loyalty that actually crop up all over the place in Japanese cinema.  Here, though, Miike’s tone doesn’t demonstrate a deeply felt approach to such notions, which may ultimately be a good thing since it’s uncertain whether Seiji Togawa’s script could support such sustained heaviness.  Instead, Miike pays just enough attention to these elements as basic audience expectations would require, no more, no less.  The result is a light concoction with crazed touches like a masochistic weapons dealer and hilariously incompetent back robbers, topped with a creamy froth of kinetic mayhem.  Pop culture references to Kim Ki-Duk and Lone Wolf and Cub let you know that Miike and Togawa are having fun and are inviting you to join them.  With a lot of escape velocity and a certain amount of shorthand they create the impression that that the yakuza movie can, as improbable as it sounds, somehow shelter every other genre under its big top—broad comedy, romance, martial arts spectacular, and so on.

You’ll notice, though, that I haven’t said you should expect a wall-to-wall actioner or a blow-you-away climax from Like a Dragon.  That’s not to say that many of the individual sequences don’t thrill, but star Kazuki Kitamura (so handsome it’s as if he’s drawn by a manga-ka) is absent for long stretches and without him the action, while diverting, is rarely compelling—it often features bad guy Goro Kishitani beating up his own henchmen.  As usual when Miike takes on clownish violence you might wonder when the dust settles how else a given scene might have been shot for greater impact and the answer is, it couldn’t have been.  The only real trouble with Like a Dragon is that there’s not a sense of escalation (e.g. Ichi, Izo, etc.) but rather a patient bridging of isolated set pieces.  Perhaps it’s only relative to the pacing established early on—and suffers from comparison to other Miike films—but in the last third of the picture the narrative begins to drag under the combined weight of the multiple storylines.  There are intriguing characters, such as a quietly troubled Korean hitman, but they’re never really allowed to become as memorable as they could be.  In short, as a popcorn flick Like a Dragon is probably right up there with the best you’ll find this year, but don’t look for the intensity and lingering resonance that characterizes much of this visionary’s other work.