Takashi Miike has never paid undue respect to the boundaries
between genres, so it's fitting that he named his frenetic take on the
spaghetti Western for a dish that involves throwing disparate elements in a pot
and boiling off the excess. Sukiyaki Western Django takes the last third of its title
from Sergio Corbucci's gritty, gory 1966 Italian oater, but it's only one of
many ingredients in Miike's superheated stir-fry.
The movie's plot, which involves a nameless gunfighter
caught between warring gangs in a small town, is lifted straight from A
Fistful Of Dollars,
itself an uncredited remake of the Japanese film Yojimbo. (So much for the advice doled out
to the mysterious stranger after he strolls into town: "Best not get any ideas
about playing Yojimbo.") Mixing the legendary battle of Dannoura with the War
Of The Roses (and throwing in a bit of Shakespeare for good measure), Miike
pits the red Haike clan, led by the hot-blooded Koichi Sato, against the white
Genji, whose Yusuke Iseya has the icy bearing of a vain pop star. With their
facial piercings and color-coordinated hair styles, the movie's hired guns
would look more at home in a Baz Luhrmann movie than a Western or a samurai
movie, but the clash of seemingly incompatible styles is what excites Miike the
most.
Although its cast is mostly Japanese, the movie's dialogue
is in thickly accented, heavily colloquial English. ("Are you gonna fight, or
are you gonna whistle Dixie?") English-speaking audiences will still need
subtitles, but that's part of the joke. Setting up Miike's mixture of
over-the-top parody and off-kilter mysticism, the movie's prologue features a
cowboy-hatted Quentin Tarantino, whose voice drops abruptly from an easy drawl
to a staccato bass, as if he too has learned his lines by rote. In spite of a
string of nifty gunfights where bullets land with a sickening squelch, Sukiyaki
Western loses some
of its appeal once the novelty of Miike's conceptual shenanigans wears off.
Even good jokes turn into shaggy-dog stories when they run too long.