KAMIKAZE TAXI (1995)
2.5 out of ****
Starring Koji Yashuko, Kazuya Takahashi, Mickey Curtis, Taketoshi Naito, Reiko Kataoka; Written & Directed by Masato Harada; Cinematography by Yoshinao Sakamoto
You know a film is in trouble when it has to explain its premise in an opening caption. The caption at the beginning of KAMIKAZE TAXI tells us three things: 1) There are 150,000 "foreign" labourers in Japan who are in fact emigrés who have returned to their homeland, where they are treated as second-class citizens, 2) There are 90,000 yakuza, and, 3) There are many corrupt politicians. The caption then observes that sometimes the lives of these three groups converge. We need this information because the film is long and unfocused, its polemical intent undermined by its tortuous script. It is part yakuza movie, part buddy movie, part road movie, part social realism, and part a lot of other things. Even with the introductory explanation to guide us, it never coheres.
It seems for quite a while that it will be just a yakuza movie, centring on Tatsuo (Kazuya Takahashi), a second-rate gangster who starts pimping for Senator Domon (Taketoshi Naito) when his predecessor is promoted in the family. Domon is a corrupt, xenophobic misogynist, an aging former kamikaze pilot who seems to represent everything that writer/director Masato Harada dislikes in Japanese society, with good reason. When Domon savagely beats one of the girls Tatsuo sends him, another girl in Tatsuo's employ protests hysterically. She is killed for her trouble by Animaru (Mickey Curtis), a yakuza thug working for Domon.
Tatsuo, who cared for the dead prostitute, is incensed by her murder. When he learns that the beaten girl's silence was bought with a small offering from a huge stash of money in Domon's house, Tatsuo and some of his buddies stage an armed robbery, making off with the Senator's money. Tatsuo, unlike his partners in crime, survives the initial manhunt by the yakuza, and finds himself to be very rich and very high on the yakuza's most wanted list. So he gets the hell out of Tokyo, wisely.
The movie thus far is engaged, violent, pointed, darkly humourous, and somewhat routine--it's just a yakuza movie, after all. Then the Japanese-born migrant workers enter the picture. The abrupt shift in direction is no less strange or arbitrary just because it is anticipated by that opening caption. Tatsuo, flush with wealth, hires a cab driven by Kantake, a Japanese-Peruvian recently returned to the country, and tells him to keep the meter running all all the way from Tokyo to Izu, where Tatsuo wants to visit his mother's grave. Cue road movie. Because Kantake is illiterate, Tatsuo has to show him the destination on a map, explaining how to read the words. And so the two men begin to bond. Cue buddy movie.
Once Kantake appears, the emphasis gradually shifts away from Tatsuo, probably because Harada realizes the cab driver is the more intriguing of the two. He is played by the affable Koji Yashuko, currently one of the best-known Japanese actors in the West, after starring in THE EEL and SHALL WE DANCE? and playing a memorable secondary role as the white-suited gangster in TAMPOPO. Yashuko plays Kantake as a quiet-spoken, imperturbable man, burdened by more than his fair share of hardships. A key early scene, a coincidental encounter with an enraged Animaru, establishes Kantake's placid strength, and suggests that he is a man who has seen so much trouble that Tatsuo's concerns seem trivial; a later monologue confirms our initial impression.
The movie nevertheless keeps coming back to Tatsuo and his trivial concerns. To honour a dying friend's request, he resolves to slaughter Domon, Animaru, et al., in a brief blaze of kamikaze glory. Kantake remains stoically by Tatsuo's side, for reasons of his own: Kantake's father, it turns out, was a kamikaze pilot with Domon during World War II, and Kantake has cause to hate the politician for his past deeds. The connection between Domon and Kantake is improbable, but drives the closing sequences, leading to a confrontation which is the film's worst scene.
While Harada's politics are admirably Leftist for the most part, he resorts to the cheap solutions of violence in the finale. Kantake, a serene pacifist when he first appears, becomes a kind of noble urban savage by the end: illiterate, unsophisticated, he obtains justice by following his heart and using his hands, brutally. Harada seems to present this transformation as desirable or at least necessary, contradicting the points he was making earlier.
All told, the film's political thrust seems both confused and, after 140 minutes, belaboured. Harada positions the film rather transparently within political discourse on contemporary Japan. In the opening sequence, for instance, he shows us excerpts from sober talking-head interviews with Japanese-born migrant workers: the tone and method are at odds with the rest of the movie. Elsewhere, there are clips from televised current affairs debates featuring Senator Domon, unsubtly underlining some of the movie's political concerns, which are too broad and complex to be addressed by a genre picture, or, in this case, three genre pictures spliced together. Rather than cramming all these discrete elements into a single film, Harada may have done better to make several shorter, tighter movies--preferably beginning with one about Kantake.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
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