Picked two interesting looking yakuza movies for this matchup, and they actually ended up having some pretty similar aspects. Act I, nice violent gangster movie set-up. Act II, an odd bit of meandering. I won't spoil Act III for either.
Sonatine Takeshi Kitano directs and stars in the film as a captain in the the Tokyo yakuza organization. His character is sent on a mission that he is immediately and openly skeptical of, and per his expectations things don't go all that well, forcing him and a handful of his men into hiding.
Kitano does this amazing thing in his performance where he can be as cold and calculating as Pacino's Michael Corleone, but there is a pretty heavy degree of the recklessness/carelessness of Robert DeNiro's Johnny Boy from Mean Streets in there too. It isn't often that you see the scary, quiet and brutal killer crack that crazy ass smile, but Kitano's performance sells it perfectly.
All the other gangsters seem to have the the reckless part down. After the incidents pushing our cast into hiding on the beach, we watch them killing time in various ways. And these various ways all have this really unsettling violent and sadistic undertones. The pointless little games they play now and then usually involve some sort of horrifying gun play...and when they don't guns seem to eventually get involved regardless.
One of my movie pet peeves is when characters have a not believable disregard for their own life...something that really bothers me in a lot of “cool” gangster movies like, say,
Smokin' Aces. Real people take cover when they are being shot at and take some precaution before walking into a slaughter. They don't just do things to service a well choreographed action scene. Henchmen should care about being alive, and not just being another target to die in cinematic fashion. Characters in
Sonatine do have this disregard that typically bothers me so much, but the movie makes it totally believable, and it is incredibly unsettling and effective. There just isn't a human level of interest in life shown in these people. Early in the movie we see Kitano's character and his men brutally and slowly murdering a guy who wouldn't pay for protection. Kitano's face is expressionless in a way that expresses every thing. We get a call back to this expression later on when he is a target of a hit a little bit later in the film. Three yakuzas about twenty feet away in a bar stand up and start unloading their pistols at his gang in a very spastic fashion. He stands up, expressionless and unenthusiastic and just starts firing back. Quite distrubing.
I wasn't in love with the ending, but the general tone of this movie works well and I am really glad I got to watch this for the bracket. I'll be pursuing more Kitano films in the near future.
vs
Kamikaze Taxi To start with a disclaimer, I watched the 134 minute version of this film. The primary complaints I've seen about this movie appear to be regarding its length and its pace, problems that would seemingly become more apparent in the 169 minute version. Without knowing what was left out, it seems like whoever cut 35 minutes out of this sucker did a decent job.
The story is about Tatsuo, a rising star amongst the gangsters who has taken over pimping duties in the yakuza. When one of his prostitutes is beaten and another is killed at the the hands of a high ranking, mobbed up politician and his men, however, he lashes back at the mob. This makes him the subject of a manhunt that lasts the majority of the movie. He meets up with a Peruvian taxi driver and they travel around Japan. He develops a kamikaze attitute, wherein he is going to kill his pursuers and accomplish a small handful of things on his bucket list, so their destinations in the taxi unfold accordingly.
Eventually along their travels, Tatsuo and the taxi driver pick up the prostitute that was beaten earlier in the movie. The best scenes in the movie unfold between the three of them. While Tatsuo is somewhat of a testosterone filled mobster, the prostitute really fuels the conversation with the taxi driver, who has an extremely complicated past which begins to tie into the stories main thread.
The movie takes an abrupt switch about 75% of the way through, and I wasn't too enthusiastic about how everything tied up after that. The violence spaced throughout the movie is always a little bit spastic and sometimes confusing. The meandering parts of the movie where Tatsuo is running away are somewhat hit and miss.
The Verdict
Well I seem to be stripping this bracket of its representatives from the crime genre, having already sent home
Cyclo and
Dang Bierley. Whichever way I go here I am adding to this trend. I really liked
Kamikaze Taxi, seemingly more than the people who moved it on in the first two rounds, and also more than the other two losers mentioned in this paragraph. It has to be sent packing here though, as it is outclassed by
Sonatine in just about every way. While
Kamikaze Taxi was a good watch, when I sat down to write about it there just didn't feel like there was much of a thread to chase....so unfortunately I feel like all I did was briefly describe the plot. If only 6 movies are getting resurrected, I sort of doubt that this will be amongst them. The 134 minute version that I watched is on youtube, so hopefully a couple people check it out.