Review: Leave it to Takashi Miike to open a film with a sequence depicting a cop posing for a playful picture with a severed gangster’s head. From here the level of irreverence goes from bad to worse when an uncompromising woman brought in for interrogation makes a crass comment to our hard boiled Detective Tatsuhito, only to end up with a folding chair across her unsuspecting face. Love him or hate him, the man has an undeniable knack for opening with a bang and making an unforgettable impression.

When one observes the canon of Miike’s work as a whole, certain similarities begin to come into focus. First off, the man loves gangsters. With more violent tales of crime in his repertoire than most directors can shake a stick at, it isn’t hard to imagine what this volatile auteur might have become if film school hadn’t panned out. I suppose it is just as well he passed up a life of fancy suits and pistol packing for a seat in a director’s chair, since things would have likely turned messy the first time Miike insisted on dealing with his rivals by drowning them in kiddy pools full of feces, but I digress. In all actuality though, it is that same panache for the weird and unusual that makes Miike’s genre pictures stand out from the rest, and Shinjuku Triad Society is no exception. Laying the foundation for such classics as Dead or Alive and Ichi the Killer, Shinjuku gives the viewer a swift jab to the mid-section as we are thrust head first into the seedy underbelly of its namesake. From our introductory venture into a shady nightclub, to a rather naughty cocaine party between two very friendly men, the atmosphere comes on thick and heavy from the get-go.

I had once read that Miike would receive the job of directing these gangster films with really standard scripts only to take them and pump them up with insanity, despite the wishes of the studio. Thus is certainly the case here. When one scrapes away the gnarled veneer that makes this film specifically Miike, you find a tale of a semi-crooked cop wedged between his desire to bring the bad guys down, and take care of his family. While that’s not exactly groundbreaking material for the genre, what separates it is the manner in which it is presented. Unfortunately, it seems that Miike manages to instantly gratify himself by getting his shocks in right at the beginning, ala DoA, and from there we are left to stumble through the excessive amounts of man on man rape, sloppy character development, and the awkward plot devices that tend to plague his earlier works.

The look of the film and direction of the camera melds perfectly with the characters and their situations, showing us no frills composition and sparse lighting effects that seem to be a metaphor for the despair that creeps throughout the story. As for the individual performances, there’s a couple of genuinely good “tough-guy” moments where a pair of gentlemen square off for a heated staring contest, but that’s about it. The dialogue is nothing to write home about, and the lack of actor power leads to some rather slow downtime during the film’s more dramatic moments. Fortunately, the patented instances of Miike shock are there, though few and far between, but when they float to the surface they sufficiently stack points in favor of the director, keeping his film leaps and bounds ahead of its peers in the department of originality.