Graveyard of Honor (2002)

Waste of time

Memorable, crazy movie

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

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.

Who said only Americans had the right to remake, defile or reinterpret, their crime classics? By adding a new 40-minute third act on Kinji Fukasaku's original 1975 film Takashi Miike firmly leans towards the second option. A reinterpetation faithful in spirit and gritty hardboiled realism to the original yet still as much a Miike film as anything else he's done, this reflected in the Japanese title of the movie ('New' Graveyard of Honor), in itself perhaps a tribute to Fukasaku's sequel series 'New' Battles Without Honor and Humanity, and the numerous gonzo stylistic flashes that fully complement the hand-held hyperkinetic style Fukasaku pioneered and which Miike here reintroduces, not in an attempt to ape the original film and not to the extent that Fukasaku used that style nor with the same deftness, but as a visual technique Miike makes his own for the duration of the film.As with the original film, the emphasis here is not on a Scarface-like rags-to-riches arch but on downfall, one long unbroken fall from grace, an ode to self-destruction and alienation as only the Japanese know how to do them. The brooding yakuza protagonist finds himself in a vicious endless cycle of violence as meaningless as the catalyst that kicked it into motion (a two-hour visit at the dentist by his boss) and there's no bottom or depth low enough for him to sink to.Miike follows all this in a sombre distanced way, allowing the brutal stabbings and shootings to take place without either glorifying or shying away from them, this helped to a good degree by a languid jazzy score and a lack of depth or dimension to the supporting characters or indeed the protagonist. We don't know these people. We don't know any more about the protagonist after two hours than we did after he first stops a yakuza hit-man by breaking a chair on his head. He goes about killing people and shooting dope, stopping only long enough to rape his girlfriend or signal to the cops that he's out of bullets.Miike being Miike, the movie is still crazy and OTT, as though he doesn't want us to take it anymore serious than we need to. I'm a big fan of yakuza pictures and Miike's Graveyard remake ranks highly among them, quite possibly the best of the several he's done. More than two hours long, the movie feels epic without ever calling attention to itself as such. Miike is not doing THE GODFATHER any more than he's doing SCARFACE. Curiously for a remake and especially compared to slick Hollywood gangster movies or quirky crimedies, Graveyard is original above all else. If I have a problem with it, is only in the hard edge of the video look on which Miike (probably for reasons of budget) insists on shooting, and that 15 minutes could've been trimmed for tightness.

This film, despite some thoughtful stuff in the final act, is strangely derivative of Takeshi Kitano (which isn't necessarily a good thing in my book). Much like Sonatine we've got a non-expressive, self-destructive protagonist who does some violent stuff while a repetitive low-rent jazz soundtrack warbles in the background. And the editing is sadistic - watch a guy slip around on ice for 45 seconds straight, watch a guy climb a rooftop ladder for 35 seconds, watch seemingly identical rape scenes, watch seemingly identical heroin usage scenes, and my personal favorite: watch the lead actor scowl into the camera over and over and over, blah blah blah. While there is no doubt that it is a Miike in the final analysis, I find it almost sacrilegious to see him borrowing so blatantly from the hack playbook of Beat Takeshi. He even put him in Izo, for cryin' out loud.

Takeshi Miike is one of my favorite filmmakers, almost for no better reason than that he's the only filmmaker I've ever seen that can set off my gag reflex. Although he shows versatility as a director with dramas like Sabu and children friendly fare like "Zebraman", he is much more well known as the hyper-violent, hyper-gory, and hyper-kinetic director of "Ichi the Killer". "Graveyard of Honor" is another one of his extreme movies. It's not as fast-paced, or even as weird, as "Ichi", but boy, does it deliver.The basic plot is that a dishwasher ends up saving the life of a Yakuza boss when he knocks out an assassin that is shooting up his restaurant. The Yakuza boss thanks him by making him his right-hand man, but the dishwasher turns out to be pretty much a sociopath, showing no fear, regret, or capability for patience, thus resulting in a violent film full of miscommunication and misunderstandings. The best part is that none of the other characters really seem that willing to take him down, so his blunt approach to killing whoever he feels goes pretty much unchecked.However, the movie is pretty slight on the plot. Really, it's more like a continuing cycle of prison-violence-heroin, prison-violence-heroin. If that description gives some pause, especially considering that this movie is over two hours long, have no fear--it's the most interesting cycle of prison-violence-heroin ever filmed, because one of Miike's primary strengths lies in his use of hyperbole. When a character jumps to his death, he doesn't just splatter; a wave of blood washes over a wall. The fascination of the character himself is matched by the deranged trust that most of the other Yakuza place in him. We're almost as attached to him as his wife, who, it seems, he purposefully got addicted to heroin so that she would depend on him.It's also, like many of Miike's works, darkly comedic in a very sick way. Just don't expect to be laughing all that often, as it's more likely you'll be running to the bathroom trying not to vomit. It also sticks with you for a while, unless you're actually as desensitized as the main character is. If that's the case, I recommend finding a nice asylum to live in for a while.--PolarisDiB