Jason
says: “A few weeks ago, someone recommended a comedy to me
by saying ‘it’s great – it’s 96 minutes long!’ And while the
complaint with long comedies tends to be that they’re bloated or
diluted by not-funny material, THE MOLE SONG often has the other
problem: Takashi Miike’s latest bit of absurdity is so high
energy that it can very easily wear the audience out by the time only
half of its two hours and ten minutes have passed.
“It starts out with policeman Reiji Kukukawa (Toma Ikuta) being fired –
though passionate about justice, he is not very bright and more trouble
than he’s worth; it’s a wonder that it took five years since he
graduated from the Academy with the lowest score ever for this to
happen. But, thinks chief Toshio Sakami (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), his
hot-headedness and single-minded devotion that overlooks the regular
rules might make him a great guy to send undercover! Reiji
accepts the job and the bizarre training of Kazuki Akagiri (Kenichi
Endo) and quickly becomes close to yakuza Masaya Hiura (Shinichi
Tsutsumi). One problem: Hiura doesn’t deal in drugs, and
that’s apparently all undercover cops are allowed to investigate in
Japan. Well, maybe two: He didn’t tell academy classmate
Junna Wakagi (Riisa Naka) where he was going, and she’s got enough of a
crush on him to come looking.
“As is often the case, Miike starts fast, introducing characters with
loud splashes before cutting to Reiji on the front of a speeding car,
naked save for some carefully placed newspaper, and then doing a lot of
jumping back and forth to explain how he got there, make the situation
a little more crazy, and get into what happens next. This half
hour or forty-five minutes is among the funniest things I’ve seen at
the movies all year – it is frantic, full of jokes that go for broke,
and manages to keep upping the ridiculousness until it is ending on a
musical number. It’s the sort of madness that maybe couldn’t be
sustained, but I don’t think I would have minded if Miike and writer
Kankuro Kudo (adapting a manga by Noboru Takahashi) had tried, even if
the movie wound up being nothing more than just one more absurdly
elaborate field test after another for about, oh, 96 minutes.
“Now, its not like things stop being funny once Reiji actually goes
undercover – the movie is still packed with jokes, a good number of
them work, and actually being surrounded by yakuza gives the filmmakers
time to introduce a series of even more warped characters. It
shifts a bit, though, and what had been high-concept slapstick
absurdity becomes a sort of yakuza movie spoof the fairly dumb Reiji
stumbling and shouting his way through a world with strict rules he
only knows the most sensationalistic versions of. It’s often
funny stuff – a sequence with Reiji screwing up a ritual is especially
hilarious – but it’s also lacking the kind of back-and-forth energy
that the opening had and the jokes seem a little more specific:
It’s not just a cops-and-crooks comedy, but a spoof of a particular
flavor of Japanese yakuza flicks, and a viewer’s enjoyment may
correlate pretty directly with how many of them he or she has seen.
“Even if it’s not that many, the audience should still get a kick out
of Toma Ikuta’s performance, which dips a thick head and a volcanic
temper in enough idealistic inexperience to make Reiji a lot of fun to
root for even if he is often very much the cause of his own
trouble. He does hilarious frustration, and in Miike’s crazy
world, his high-volume emoting doesn’t seem like ham at all.
Mitsuru Fukikoshi and Kenichi Endo are great complements to him as the
cops meant to be mentors whose glibness just drives Reiji
crazier. There’s a weird charm to Shinichi Tsutsumi’s
happy-go-lucky gangster, a butterfly enthusiast who insists yakuza
should be funny, and a positive mania to Takashi Okamura as ‘Nekozawa’,
who takes the ‘neko’ (cat, in Japanese) in his name seriously. It
would be nice if Riisa Naka had a little more to do – she’s funny and
super-cute, but gets to use the latter more than the former and
disappears from the movie for stretches.
“Miike lets them play big, because that’s the way he rolls with this
sort of comedy. In a way, the very fact that a bunch of studios
are paying Takashi Miike to make this slick spoof with big action
scenes, animated cut-ins, and some decent visual effects is the
funniest bit of all, since it wasn’t all that long ago that Miike was
making yakuza movies that covered their low budget with the sort of
bombast that this movie amplifies as a joke. Whatever the budget
he’s working under, though, he’s still a guy who knows how to put a
highly entertaining movie together; that hugely entertaining start
could have been a complete mess with a less sure hand, and he never
lets the movie get out of control, no matter how anarchic the material
may be.
“He’s done enough of these bigger movies by now that it’s no longer
fair to say that doing the big projects keeps him from the sort of
focus that his micro-budget origins required; he’s good at every
scale. Sometimes, when you make as many movies as he does, one
just doesn’t turn out as great as it could be, and while this one is
still worth seeing for the opening act alone, it could be a great one
if it tightened up a bit. 4 cats
“Seen 17 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia
Festival 2014, DCP)” |
