Um… hm, I guess I don’t really know how to answer this. Some of his movies are great, some of his movies are pretty awful. That is probably to be expected when you are workhorse director, heading an average of 5-8 movies a year at your peak. He has certainly become more consistent over time, but, I don’t know, there is no real artistry at work in Miike movies, some merely provide the illusion of such. That isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty that I have enjoyed; he just seems to get lumped in with a lot of filmmakers who is just not up to snuff with by foreign fans… largely due to the fact that he is Japanese. If he were an American director and fans here were subjected to all of the by-numbers forgettable movies he cranks out that, with good reason, never get international distribution… I do not think that he would be met with the same acclaim.
“Audition” is a slow-burning and rather impeccable horror film that I feel is rightfully held as a modern classic. ”Ichi the Killer” is a choatic and inconsistent wash of a movie whose significant failings get looked over largely because of the amount within it that does work. There is an awful lot within “Ichi” that works, making the sort of iffier portions feel all the more bothersome. I really like the whole approach to storytelling that they go for. I think that the focus on side-characters and jumping back and forth along the timeline makes for a really well textured movie, rather than the mess it by all means should have been. In the end, Kakihara and Ichi are rather uninteresting characters, treated more like lists of dysfunctions than actual entities. Any actual weight is, very much intentionally, I believe, carried by the cast around them. To many degrees, that works. That works really well. The MTV editing of some portions, along with the abysmal (as well as wholly unnecessary) CGI, really stand as reminders that it was not so much the work of a great director, but, a director who has managed to make a couple of great things.
Even now, as the technical side of his films have been greatly smoothed out, he is one of those directors who has made his own brand by borrowing and re-purposing styles and approaches. There is some degree to which he relies too heavily on style rather than substance in regards to visual design and storytelling as a whole. Not that their films are terribly similar, but, in this way, there is a sort of Tarantino-vibe that he carries. Just as I unabashedly enjoy some Tarantino movies, I cannot deny that he deserves much of the criticism leveled at him in this regard. Miike also sometimes seems to rely on edginess for edginess’ sake, which is also sort of off-putting to me.
With alllll of that qualifying bullshit out of the way, yeah, I like some Takashi Miike movies. “Ichi the Killer,” despite the issues I have developed with it, numbers among them.
