An alarmingly catchy toothpaste commercial is the only thing you\u2019ll care to remember from \u201cWhy Don\u2019t You Play in Hell?,\u201d a tedious, over-the-top gorefest that finds prolific Japanese auteur Sion Sono veering into sub-Tarantino B-movie-pastiche territory. Relentlessly jokey, strenuously deranged and conspicuously pleased with itself, this overstuffed yarn about two warring yakuza clans and an amateur filmmaking crew is an empty exercise in carnage maximus. Following last year\u2019s \u201cThe Land of Hope,\u201d a surprisingly sober-minded drama addressing the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Sono has delivered a picture geared exclusively toward his most grindhouse-oriented fans, though even they may leave feeling a bit let down. Bound for Toronto\u2019s Midnight Madness sidebar and Austin\u2019s Fantastic Fest, \u201cHell\u201d will play in North American theaters next year via Drafthouse Films.
\nGet Venice Film Festival News and alerts free to your inbox<\/p>\n
According to the press materials, Sono wrote the script 17 years ago but only dusted it off recently; he didn\u2019t change much (pity), except to weave in a \u201crequiem for 35mm\u201d as acknowledgment of the ongoing ascendancy of digital filmmaking. And the film does open with a promising burst of cine-happy nostalgia as aspiring movie director Don Hirata (Hiroki Hasegawa, irritating) flashes back to a moment 10 years earlier, when he gathered together a group of enthusiastic, 8mm camera-wielding wannabes and dubbed them the Fuck Bombers. (Why? It doesn\u2019t matter.) Their apparent method, suggesting a bizarre fusion of documentary and flash-mob techniques, is to go out and film whatever mayhem and carnage they can find.<\/p>\n
And they find plenty, as they happen to be in the vicinity of a vicious gangland war between yakuza boss Muto (Jun Kunimura) and rival clan leader Jun Ikegama (Shinichi Tsutsumi). When Ikegama and his men invade Muto\u2019s home to finish him off, they instead encounter Muto\u2019s berserk, bloodthirsty wife, Shizue (Tomochika), who, after unleashing the first of the film\u2019s many blood-soaked setpieces, is sentenced to a decade in prison for murder. One of the event\u2019s more tragic repercussions is that it wrecks the acting career of the Mutos\u2019 adorable young daughter, Mitsuko, whose aforementioned toothpaste commercial gets yanked from the airwaves in response to the scandal.<\/p>\n
Ten years later, Shizue is about to be released, and she\u2019s eager to see Mitsuko (Fumi Nikaido) make her long-overdue bigscreen debut in a small independent film. But bratty teen Mitsuko has apparently gone all Lindsay Lohan on the shoot and gotten herself kicked off the production (which at least raises the interesting question of what \u201cThe Canyons\u201d director and Venice Horizons jury president Paul Schrader will make of Sono\u2019s film). Here to save the day, or ruin it, or whatever, are the Fuck Bombers, who hit upon a nonsensical plan to restore Mitsuko to indie stardom, settle the yakuza war and make a totally kick-ass action movie to boot.<\/p>\n
And indeed, this is one gonzo schlockfest that takes pains to wear its movie love on its sleeve, like \u201cKill Bill\u201d without the style or finesse; one character even spends most of the film in Bruce Lee\u2019s yellow tracksuit. Some of the other cinematic references skew higherbrow, as when a bright red balloon ascends into the sky, or when a sequence is overlaid with a contempo cover version of Handel\u2019s \u201cSarabande\u201d from \u201cBarry Lyndon.\u201d But for all his mixing and remixing of pop favorites, Sono doesn\u2019t seem to take much delight in the process, and his boredom proves contagious; this is a perfunctory pastiche that crucially lacks the sense of delirium that would bring its artificial world to life.<\/p>\n
A trim 90-minute version of \u201cWhy Don\u2019t You Play in Hell?\u201d would probably be just as pointless but fractionally less dull; at its current \u201cdirector\u2019s cut\u201d length of 119 minutes (sans closing credits), Sono\u2019s chaotically edited story manages to be at once convoluted and threadbare as it forces its oil-and-water parallel narratives to converge. Idiot catchphrases are repeated for no reason; performances are cranked up to shouty, migraine-inducing volumes; scenes seem to be layered in such a way as to prevent rather than aid comprehension. The only time the pic seems to slow down is when it wants the audience to savor a particularly sadistic setpiece, as when Mitsuko confronts an ex-b.f., proving the old maxim that revenge is a dish best served cold and with a side order of oral mutilation.<\/p>\n
There is, perhaps, the faintest whiff of an auto-critique at the climax \u2014 a film-within-a-film bloodbath of such numbing, grotesquely cartoonish proportions that it could be commenting on how violence-obsessed filmmakers are out of touch with the reality of the imagery they\u2019re exploiting, or perhaps how the rise of digital cinema has only quickened the medium\u2019s dehumanization. But a flicker of self-awareness doesn\u2019t make this hollow provocation any less of a self-deflating bore.