Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This flick isn't awful, but it's not really great either. I'm unclear as to why exactly it was (re)made. It's too violent to be believable, there are too many guns, there are waaay too many deaths to be even close to making me suspend my disbelief, but the violence is handled so realistically as to not make much sense.If this movie went over the top into a demented fever dream, cool, but it doesn't. The presentation is so nuts and bolts and kitchen sink the constant ultra violence just doesn't seem at all plausible. It's one of those movies where you wonder where the police are, when a guy strung out on heroin shoots up his apartment in the middle of the day with at least eight handguns (in Japan!). Apparently nobody ever calls the (ever-present and ever-watching) police in Japan. It's just not believable. Sorry.The tiresome unpleasantness of the main character is also past belief. I suspect any effective crime organization would have taken him down or had him incarcerated at the first stray bullet. Dumb. I'm not saying crazy Yakuza thrillers aren't good, I'm saying this one isn't. Not worth it.

If Japan is "perfect", how does "imperfection" look like? The protagonist in this movie embodies exactly that. Which takes away a lot of the "Scarface"-like thriller elements. There is a story about a guy stepping up in a mafia environment, but his stoic anti-will, the fact he hurts EVERYone - helpers, supporters, lovers and foes - is meant to be allegorically political.It's stated somewhere and in fact, there's some few scenes that appear very illogical. Not so, if you watch the movies "the right way".Movie is calm, depressing, melancholic, bloody painful, sometimes crazy (in one scene he shoots at everyone: police, bypassers etc., then going "SORRY, OUTTA AMMO!" and delivers himself).Good, disturbing, mature Miike-movie. Not as cartoonish as most of his films.

BATTLE ROYALE was the movie that brought the name Kinji Fukasaku to the lips of most people in the west for the first time, but he'd made his name in Japan many years earlier with a series of gritty and violent gangster movies that changed the face of the genre. In 1975 he made one such movie, called GRAVEYARD OF HONOR. In 2002, Takashi Miike decided to make a movie called GRAVEYARD OF HONOR too.I haven't seen Fukasaku's original movie, so I have no idea how Miike's version compares. Normally you would expect a Miike movie to bear little resemblance to its source material, but in this case I'm not so sure.GRAVEYARD OF HONOR tells the story of a man called Ishimatsu (Goro Kishitani), who is propelled into a relatively high ranking position in the Yakuza after saving the family head's life. His violent personality makes him feared and perhaps respected, but eventually gets him into trouble. He p***es off the family, and to such a degree that no little finger is going to get him off the hook. The stage is set for a small scale gang war.GRAVEYARD OF HONOR is a much more conventional yakuza movie than any of his others, e.g. DEAD OR ALIVE. It's played pretty much straight, missing the wit and manic invention that characterises Miike at his most playful. Unfortunately, it's also missing the complex 3-dimensional characters that make Miike's more dramatic movies so good. It's a fairly straight genre movie that doesn't scratch particularly deep below the surface, in other words. This may be because Miike wished to stay faithful to the source material, but it is rather a surprise from the director whose work is normally amongst the most inventive in the world. Rather a disappointment, too.Miike can definitely do straight drama, but in movies like RAINY DOG and BLUES HARP it is the fascinating, believable and sympathetic characters that make the films stand out from the crowd. Characters in GRAVEYARD OF HONOR are much harder to relate to, and their intentions and motivations are often unclear or seemingly thin. In particular it's hard to understand Ishimatsu's actions, beyond the facts that he's very violent and not very smart. It's very hard to empathasize or even sympathize with him, and very difficult to actually like or care for him too. Even an anti-hero needs some humanity we can relate to, or at least a shed load of charisma. Goro Kishitani injects his character with neither.I'd been led to expect GRAVEYARD OF HONOR to be somewhat action packed, and there are a few scenes of fairly brutal violence but nothing like the cool stylised action of DEAD OR ALIVE: FINAL. In fact, most of the movie is very slow - rather boring even. I actually took a break for an hour and a half in the middle to go and do some work, which isn't a great sign GRAVEYARD OF HONOR is probably not a bad gangster movie, but it is very disappointing as a Takashi Miike movie. Pretty much any director could have handled the job, and only a couple of scenes show any of Miike's characteristic style, wit or perverse genius. Basically, I'd hoped for something more.Not recommended much.The ebay DVD has a decent anamorphic transfer, presumably ripped from the Japanese release and re-encoded to fit on a DVD-5. Sound is functional stereo, and subtitles are optional and very well translated. If you want to see the movie, this is your best option for now.

Takashi Miike's remake of Kinji Fukasaku's 1975 film of the same name is a rather straightforward Japanese Yakuza thriller with a hefty dose of violence. However, this violence is less comic-style than in Miikes best work "Fudoh", "Dead or Alive" or "Ichi the Killer". The violence comes across as raw and real. This gives the film a gritty edge that reminded me more of the classic Yakuza flicks than of a Miike film. There are occasional outbursts of over-the-top-Miike-isms (the final "fall" of the hero, a throat-slicing etc.) but they are limited to a few scenes. Another Miike-trademark in the film will be as problematic as ever: The harsh treatment of women. The hero's first contact with his future wife and the beating of said wife later in the film did strike me as particularly unappealing. However, I felt that in "Graveyard of Honor", men and women get treated the same way - badly that is. No one gets away clean in this film and to label Miike a chauvinist (or whatever names circulate the web) would be more appropriate with some of his other films.Taking all into account, "Graveyard of Honor" is a surprisingly mannered Miike-outing. Definitely not my favorite because it lacks the over-the-top-appeal I came to love, but a strong motion picture never the less. A gritty gangster flick with raw violence and unsympathetic characters. Of course a must see for Miike fans.My rating: 7/10