Ichi the Killer

In the eternal, cosmic battle between sadists and masochists--or, uh, I mean, more like, weird perverts who jack off and weird perverts who don't jack off, I guess, or between sexually-liberated sadomasochists and sexually-repressed psychotics, or, you know, mentally ill people and gangsters, or people with hypnotic powers and people with violent tendencies--an intense moral battle between the worst people you could ever imagine. And, if you're like me, some part of them is going to capture your heart. I mean, how could they not? There's Kakihara, who is his boss Anjo's masochistic submissive, and a talented sadist and torturer in his own right, a very impish sort of person and almost the avatar of love. Of course, there's Ichi, who is aroused by violence and perceives himself as a super hero, a hopeless and traumatized freak who's being hypnotized by old man Jijii. There's also Karen, Anjo's Zainichi Chinese girlfriend who doesn't care about him, who instead falls in love with Kakihara, and seeks to replace Anjo in his heart without much success--but in actuality she's just one of the old man's stooges, perhaps under some sort of hypnosis herself. Then there's all the side characters other than Karen, like Juro and Saburo, corrupt twin cops, the latter of whom slips on dog ears and sniffs out someone's cock from the cunt of a tortured prostitute, Myu-Myu. Once you've given yourself over to the story, it's hard not to fall in love with some of them, I think. Or maybe that's just me. In the end, the unexplained and unexpected and unrevealed hypnotic powers of Takeshi save the day, as he causes Kakihara to hallucinate a renewed attack from the ultimate sadist he's fantasized about, while presumably kicking a helpless Ichi to death for his own good. Kakihara maybe falls to his death, or maybe the old man just hallucinates that, and in the final moment we see Takeshi taking care of the old man. I have to appreciate how much Shinya Tsukamoto's presence in this film dovetails with his own obsessions as a filmmaker. The reveal that his character is this huge, jacked bodybuilder-martial artist is, like everything else in the film, played for laughs, but also relates deeply to the core theme of transforming oneself into a beast, which follows through all the way to Takeshi becoming fully identified with death. This review is busy, but not ever quite as busy as the film, which is overwhelming and overstimulating to levels it's hard to describe, much less cope with during a viewing. I love that so fucking much. This aspect of the film is what helps Ichi the Killer become a particularly bleak comedy. Ichi the Killer feels like home to me. This goes on my "Leaving Soon!" on Tubi movies I watched list, which probably has at least one other film featuring genital torture. It also went on my ballot for that NYT best films of the 21st century thing. said in english: "I was hoping you'll cut little pieces of me."