Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

I've sat through some rough opening sequences in my time. Awkward exposition dumps, clunky title cards, cold opens that kill the mood stone dead before the film's even found its feet. But the intro to Sukiyaki Western Django might genuinely be the worst I've ever seen. I mean that. Quentin Tarantino turns up, chewing scenery in a way that goes beyond self-indulgent into something actively painful to watch. The accent is all over the place, the set design looks like it was thrown together on a lunch break, and the whole thing radiates a kind of smug confidence that it absolutely has not earned. It doesn't feel playful or knowing. It just feels embarrassing. And the problem is, once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. That intro poisons the well before a single drop of the actual film has hit your glass.

Which is a genuine shame, because when the film proper begins, there are flashes of something worth looking at. The visuals have a real ambition to them. The colour palette is bold, the framing sometimes genuinely striking, and you can see director Takashi Miike swinging for a kind of stylised East-meets-West genre mash-up that, on paper, sounds like it could be a wild ride. A spaghetti western filtered through a Japanese lens, played out by a Japanese cast speaking phonetic English. It's a mad idea. I wanted it to work.

But wanting something to work and watching it work are two very different things. The execution here is so strange, so inconsistent, so tonally scattered that even the good-looking bits end up feeling hollow. The English dialogue, delivered phonetically by the cast, creates this permanent distance between the viewer and the story. I understand that's a deliberate choice, a kind of homage to the dubbing of classic Japanese cinema imported to the West, turned back on itself. I get the concept. I just don't think it works in practice for a feature-length film. What might function as a clever short film joke becomes an endurance test stretched across two hours.

There's a version of this film I could love. I'm a genuine fan of genre cinema done with ambition and flair. When action films commit fully to their aesthetic and execute it with craft and confidence, they can be extraordinary. I think about something like The Raid 2, a film that has absolute command of its own identity and never loses the plot of what it's trying to do. Sukiyaki Western Django has no such command. It lurches. It winks at the camera constantly. It mistakes busyness for energy and weirdness for depth.

Miike is clearly a filmmaker with vision. I won't take that away from him. But vision without discipline can produce a mess, and this is, I'm sorry to say, a mess. A pretty mess in places, yes. A mess with occasionally interesting ideas scattered through it like shrapnel. But a mess all the same.

I've genuinely been trying to find the right words to describe how this film made me feel, and I keep coming back to deflated. Not angry, not bored in a blank way, but deflated. Because there's enough here to suggest it could have been good. The bones of something worthwhile are buried in there somewhere. Instead what we get is a film that trips over its own cleverness at every turn, undone from the very first scene by a cameo that signals, loudly and clearly, that cool posturing is going to take precedence over storytelling every single time.

One of the worst films I've seen. Half a star, and that half is purely for the odd moment of visual imagination. The rest of it I'd gladly forget.

Rating: ½  | Year: 2007  | Watched: 2025-05-03

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