Strong and Moving!

Just perfect...

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This film's storyline as explained in IMDb must be one of the most deceiving on the site. This is not an action film. This is not a sci-fi film. This film is the most boring piece of pseudo-philosophical politics I've seen in a long time. Hell, while watching, I've been several times tempted to press stop. It'd have been the first time in my life that I stopped watching a film out of boredom. Instead, I simply used double speed sometimes. I never did that before either. Now I reckon I only watched Miike's Audition and was interested in 13 Assassins. The whole Ichi The Killer praise didn't appeal to me. And, after watching this piece of rubbish, I may as well never watch another of this director's movies again. Miike tries to make this story peculiar and innovative by creating an abstract environment and plot. If you want a linear or a story that makes minimal sense, go somewhere else. This is pure experimentation. In this case, with horrible results. If you want to expose certain ideas about society, you don't need to make those ideas so obscure that only Japanese or deranged people can access them. This is NOT an enjoyable film. Interesringly, I had the same feeling with a couple of other Japanese films (thus my remark regarding being Japanese to understand it), but none of them bored me to death as this one did. Honestly, watch it at your own risk, or if you want to boast about how deep your knowledge of the absurd goes. Miike, never again.

Miike has slowly amassed international recognition for his shockingly extreme violence and absurd sexual perversions. Many of his films contain explicit and lurid bloodshed, often in an outlandish, ridiculous way. This particular action fantasy of his seems to have proved less accessible to anyone other than art-house audiences and fans of extreme cinema. I have yet to understand why. This bizarre massacre is full of symbolisms and simultaneously provokes both metaphysical complexities and suspension of disbelief. But so it goes with Miike.There is a vast world of difference between a self-indulgent affectation of symbolism or intellectual pretension and a film by Takashi Miike in which he decides to offer some substance. There should not be some sort of barrier between the film and its audience. There is a remarkably unique atmosphere to this film, a dark, drug-like visual fusion of grunge and everything foreign to the viewer. We begin when the Shogunate is on its last legs, but still capable of punishing its enemies. The one we see is Izo, an assassin in the service of a warlord. After killing countless Shogun men, Izo is crucified and repeatedly speared. Instead of being passing on into an afterlife or ceasing to exist, his rage propels him through the space-time continuum, which races by through stock footage of World War II, to present-day Tokyo, where he finds himself on the streets and one with the city's destitute, a little like Bram Stoker's Dracula in that this violent warrior's vengeful soul transcends mortality to oppose it forever.Here Izo kills everyone in sight, no matter where time and space spontaneously and indefinitely throw him, his spirit still full of rage from his treatment in his past life, seemingly slicing and dicing timelessly till he can finally reach the karmic powers-that-be, one allegorical character played by the great minimalist actor-director Beat Takeshi, whose predecessors put him to death.Miike's depiction of the title character, or more exactly his phantom life force, exceeds reality, time and space as a surrealist rendering of Izo's extraordinarily and endlessly gory yet philosophical confrontations in a literal infinity drenched by symbolic imagery and characterizations, and accompanied by the fascinating, hilarious, disturbing acid-folk singer Kazuki Tomokawa on guitar.He is not stuffing these elements and images with profundity. He is actually telling the story as directly as one could. By symbolic imagery, I do not mean Bergmanesque questions of identity and metaphors that lie too deep for words or many other forms of reaction. I mean we actually at a couple of points see Izo running laps around a computer-generated infinity symbol. Different instances like the scene in which flowers gossip about and laugh at him, a woman pulling a sword from her vagina, Izo fully clad in samurai apparel and spattered with blood walking through an incidental modern office of cubicles. These are all very direct illustrations of surrealism, basic features of the element of surprise and startling juxtapositions.Really, in spite of this supernatural bloodbath's abstract implications, it is an explosion of rage and psychosis, endlessly violent, with a body count significantly higher than the Kill Bill films or even other gorefests by Miike himself. It is massive entertainment in the sense that a violent video game is, relieving your tensions by reflecting every ounce of aggression you may feel. My experience seeing it was refreshingly rich.

Generally speaking, I am a fan of director Takashi Miike. His masterpiece "Audition" of 1999 is one of the very few brilliant Horror films from the 90s, and his repertoire includes quite a bunch of other great films. That being said, my feelings on "Izo" of 2004 are mixed. Miike is not exactly known for his conventional style of film-making, and "Izo" is indeed a film of unspeakable weirdness (which I like). The film, which is, as usual for Miike's films, very gory (even though actually not even quite as brutal as I expected it to be), basically consists of a vast number of gory battle sequences. These scenes of carnage are strung together with intervals of philosophical questions concerning life, politics and sociology. The film, which is more than imaginatively made with impressive and surreal settings, a perfect photography and astonishing effects, is brilliant in some aspects, and it has some moments that are downright ingenious. That being said, it sadly gets incredibly monotonous after a while and, as far as I am concerned, it is at least 30 minutes too long. In spite of its weirdness, "Izo" therefore regrettably evokes mainly one feeling: That of boredom.In 1865, the assassin Izo (Kazuya Nakayama), who stands in the service of Hanpeida, an Imperial supporter, is captured after having killed many of the Shogun's men. After being executed in a particularly cruel manner, Izo does not vanish, but his rage makes him return as a vengeful (semi-)ghost, traveling through the ages in order to get his revenge...As mentioned above, the film is very good in several aspects. It is immensely stylishly made, the carnage sequences are exceptional, the often surreal settings are more than impressive. In short: all the stylistic elements are superb, and I also liked the philosophical approaches. The performances are also good, Kazuya Nakayama is weird enough as Izo, and the supporting cast includes the great Takeshi Kitano. Inbetween, however, the film becomes overlong, sometimes almost insufferably boring, making it hard to sit through. Like everything by Miike, the film is a matter of personal taste; unlike many of his other films, this one didn't meet mine. Worth checking out for hardcore Miike-enthusiasts, but boring to sit through for everyone else.

A warrior travels through time and space and thoroughly butchers, in spectacular grand guignol fashion, almost everybody he runs into. Miike's "El Topo-like action-fantasy is a strange, stylish, confused melange of energy and anger, a poem to retribution, the sins of history, self-abasement and bloody ambition. High production values dominate and the action set pieces are quite beautifully filmed and choreographed. The blood spurts in glorious geysers and the theatrical stylings give the entire affair a kabuki feel. Unfortunately, the lengthy running time tests tolerance levels because there is little emotional weight between the sprockets. "Izo" is a cold film, a distancing film, but it has an intensity that is engaging and a sense of anarchy about it that recalls Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers". Although my favorite Miike films are "Visitor Q" and "Ichi The Killer", I enjoyed "Izo" in spurts (bloody ones, of course).