RON’S BEARD VS ICHI THE KILLER (2001)

It’s sex, violence, and facial mutilation in the hyper-masculine world of the yakuza. Ron’s beard is soaking in blood thanks to the master of cinematic mayhem, Takashi Miike. But does the splatter live up to the hype?

As sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer Kakihara searches for his missing boss he comes across Ichi, a repressed and psychotic killer who may be able to inflict levels of pain that Kakihara has only dreamed of achieving.

Directed by: Takashi Miike

Written by: Sakichi Sato, Hideo Yamamoto

Starring: Tadanobu Asano, Nao Ômori, Shin’ya Tsukamoto, Alien Sun, Sabu, Susumu Terajima, Shun Sugata

Run Time: 130 minutes

With his splashy breakout movie AUDITION, Japanese cult director Takashi Miike broke out onto the international scene with a frankly strange filmography. He doesn’t make just horror movies, or action movies, but… every kind of movie? Comedies, dramas, true-crime stories, children’s movies, spoofs, superhero films, samurai tales, animes, tokusatsu films, magical girl properties, Westerns (with Quentin Tarantino as an actor), music videos, commercials, theatrical productions, and dozens of episodes of television… when you have 125 directing credits and as many as 8 projects released in a single calendar year, you can cover a lot of ground.

Takashi Miike is cinema’s marathon man. He’s best known in the West as a director of hyper-violent crime and horror films, mixing both extreme, almost cartoonish violence with a taste for sexual overtones, undertones, and just plain tones. However, his work is both quantity and quality, with his later films being nominated for the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or and the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, as well as several Japanese Academy Awards. However, while his early work in straight-to-video films gave him exposure in Japan and his later work garners him critical praise, it’s his run from 1999’s AUDITION through 2002’s DEAD OR ALIVE:  FINAL that made him a cult hero among cinephiles and J-horror junkies.

From the very opening scene, the combination of sex and violence that defined much of Miike’s early work is on display. Ichi (Nao Ômori) is abused by his handler Jijii (Shin’ya Tsukamoto), fed a mixture of truth and lies to keep him compliant, and uses his repression and capacity for violence to his own end, just letting Ichi off the leash enough to take care of Jijii’s dispute with the Anjo clan of yakuza. Unfortunately for Jijii, the Anjo clan’s lieutenant, Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano) is just as masochistic as Ichi is sadistic, meaning their inevitable showdown is literally the immovable object versus the irresistible force for people who get unreasonably turned on by bloodshed.

It’s something of an interesting push-and-pull. Ichi, the movie’s ostensible hero, is clad in black leather motorcycle armor with a giant 1 on the back and he seems to operate mostly on instinct. Ichi gets manipulated into fighting by Jijii or becomes aroused and gives into his violence, operating on a mechanical level without even really considering his actions, even when it means he hurts people he otherwise is friendly to. Ichi operates on pure instinct.

Kakihara, on the other hand, is the movie’s most charismatic character. He has flashy clothes and dyed blonde hair, interesting facial piercings/scarring, and while Ichi applies violence in uncontrolled fits and starts, Kakihara is cold, calculating, following the trail left to find the person he believes killed his boss while staying rigidly within the yakuza’s code of conduct. Certainly, he is just as violent as Ichi, but while Ichi is all reactive, Kakihara is purposeful. Neither man is heroic, but Ichi stands by and lets women get beaten for his own gratification, and at least Kakihara has some kind of moral code.

The closest to a good person in the movie, Kaneko (Sabu), is still a murderous gangster, but at least he’s a professional who doesn’t engage in violence for prurient reasons. He’s just trying to make money and take care of his son, and gets involved in the hunt for Ichi simply by association with Anjo’s gang, though one of Ichi’s few selfless actions in the film involves Kaneko’s son, which gives him something of a divided loyalty between the two opposing forces. Kaneko is seemingly the only major player in the film who has something of a normal life outside of murder and torture, and as such, he’s the closest thing to an audience surrogate the film offers.

Like most of Miike’s films of this period, ICHI THE KILLER is not for the faint of heart. The violence goes beyond graphic and borders on the realm of body horror similar to some of the more creative sequences in Timo Tjahjanto’s excellent splatter fest THE NIGHT COMES FOR US. ICHI THE KILLER is not for the faint-hearted, with a list of trigger warnings the likes of which are hard to believe even while watching the film. Miike’s major influences, the melodrama of Hideo Gosha, the body horror of David Cronenberg, and the brain-melting surreal visuals of David Lynch all come into play in one hyperviolent, sexually weird, colorful, and splatter-iffic package that has to be seen to be believed.

The only question is, can you believe it? The amount of psychological manipulation Ichi undergoes makes him a very unreliable narrator, and Kakihara isn’t particularly trustworthy himself. The real violence and fantasy violence are deliberately hard to keep separated, but it doesn’t particularly matter either to the movie or to the viewing of the movie. ICHI THE KILLER isn’t style over substance; the style is the substance and everything else is drowned beneath body modification and bodily fluids.

Ron Hogan is a writer, podcaster, gadabout, and raconteur from Louisville, Kentucky. You can read his written works at Den of Geek, Film Stories, and at several magazines and sites that no longer exist. You can hear his voice (and potentially see his magnificent beard) on the Film Strip Podcast. 

Oh, and Ron’s Beard is epic.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing. Thank you for understanding.