Sukiyaki Western Django

If you’re not familiar with Takashi Miike, then you should move out of the box you’re living in and get some culture – I say that, but by crawling out of that box, you’ll be opening yourself up for one of the most messed up minds in Japanese horror/gore/weird films. When Miike makes a western, you’ll pay attention. Sukiyaki Western Django is a samurai western – yes, Japanese cowboys with swords. Where’s the bad?!?

The movie opens with some bad CGI birds – seriously, between Noah’s Ark and this movie, I’m wondering if birds are extremely difficult to do special effects with. And if it is, why do directors insist on putting birds in every shot? Geeeesh. Anyway, Quentin Tarantino tells the story to some people who are holding him at gunpoint: there’s two clans, the reds and the whites and they battle in Nevada, where they live across the street from each other. They’re in town looking for this hidden gold and they constantly argue and shoot each other up. Most of the actual townspeople have left because of all the fighting over gold. A stranger shows up in town and tells both the reds and the whites that he’ll hire himself out to the highest bidder in return for a portion of the gold when he finds it. They fight and haggle over it and there’s no real clear winner.

A wagon shows up (pulled by a bunch of people) and it’s carrying dynamite and also a coffin with a giant automatic machine gun. The reds try to hijack the wagon and end up getting blown to bits by the machine gun. Tarantino shows up later as an old man after he has trained Blood Benton (Double-B) to be a fancy gunfighter. She’s quite the badass, actually. The conniving town sheriff has a bad case of the angel/demon on the shoulder and it makes him beat himself up occasionally. The keepers of the town gold bring it into the town plaza and when the whites try to take the gold, someone shoots them in their peni. Yup, really. There’s a big shoot out at the end of the movie involving the reds, the whites, and the keepers of the gold.

This movie was slightly entertaining, but nothing like Miike’s other films. I found myself pretty bored and felt like the previews and trailer showed the best scenes and made it out to be MUCH more entertaining than it actually was. I was very disappointed. However, some of the actors haven’t learned English (CLEARLY) and someone has taught them the individual phonetic syllables in Japanese sounds, so it’s quite painful, but borderline hilarious. You can tell Miike made this film, but it’s no wonder why it made a big splash (because it had some backing from Tarantino, obviously) and then fizzled out quickly. It’s very unfortunate, as I had really high hopes for this film before its release.