As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column, although this time the rules will be somewhat different. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.
Of all of the United States’ contributions to popular culture, one of the most enduring has been the Western genre. In the mid- to late-1800s, stories about cowboys and the Wild West carved out a particularly American idiom in literature, and after the invention of the motion picture, many of the most popular movies- such as Edison and Porter’s The Great Train Robbery- were Westerns. In the classical age of Hollywood, few genres were more popular throughout the world than the Western.
By the 1950s, foreign filmmakers were beginning to show their Western influences, notably Akira Kurosawa in films like The Seven Samurai. And this influence became explicit by the 1960s when a number of Italian filmmakers began to produce Westerns in Europe. The resulting films quickly became known as “spaghetti Westerns,” and their popularity began a wave of Wild West stories made on foreign soil. There were “paella Westerns” in Spain, “cod Westerns” in Scandinavia, even “curry Westerns” in India. It was only a matter of time until a Japanese filmmaker would offer up a Japanese take on the genre, and it seems only natural that the filmmaker would be prolific genre-bender Takashi Miike. It also seems obvious that Quentin Tarantino would have some part in the proceedings, but that’s another issue entirely.
Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django is first and foremost an homage to classic Westerns of the past. Even its premise- a mysterious mercenary wanders into the middle of a turf war and proceeds to play both sides- is one of the archetypal storylines of the genre. It has served as the storyline for a number of “spaghetti Westerns” including Sergio Leone’s seminal A Fistful of Dollars and Corbucci’s Django, which lent Miike’s film its title. Of course, both films were essentially Western takes on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which in turn was a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. But you get the idea- Miike’s genuflecting before the old masters. There’s even a whiff of Shakespeare in the story, in which the rival gangs are signified by the colors Red and White, in homage to England’s Wars of the Roses.
But although Miike has all his references in order, the end result is somewhat underwhelming. Miike hits all of the expected genre beats, but very little that happens in the film carries much weight. Part of the problem is that the characters just aren’t all that memorable. We meet the mysterious gunfighter, the samurai-styled leader of the Whites, the Shakespeare-obsessed leader of the Reds, the revenge-bent woman, the duplicitous lawman. Hell, there’s even a middle-aged woman who turns out to be the famed warrior Bloody Benten, whose name I would imagine was inspired by the same Japanese deity who lent her name to Screengrab favorite Benten Films. But Miike is so busy with other business that he never finds time to really do much with the people who populate his story. Even the gunfighter gets lost in the shuffle for much of the film.
As I mentioned before, Miike fan and friend Quentin Tarantino appears in the film, playing an old gunfighter named Ringo who tells the saga of Bloody Benten and literalizes the sukiyaki motif. Many of Tarantino’s own films also tend to be elaborate homages, but unlike Sukiyaki they tend to add up to something more than the sum of their references. Much of this has to do the way Tarantino actually manages to take time to establish the characters in his films- for example, the way he actually shows us some of Budd’s life in Kill Bill instead of just making him a rival, or the scene in Death Proof in which he reveals that the fearsome-looking Stuntman Mike is actually a whiny baby. On one level, Tarantino noodles in the margins of his story just as much as Miike, but while Tarantino’s noodlings lend his films additional depth, Miike’s tend to feel like one-off moments, designed to grab the attention but have little relevance on the story at large. Granted, some of these 
moments are pretty awesome- look at the way Ringo procures an egg for his sukiyaki, or the goofy touch of having the two-faced lawman suffer from multiple personality disorder- but put together they don’t really add up.
Or consider the films of Sergio Leone, whose storylines were every bit as impenetrable as Sukiyaki’s, but whose style pushed the iconography to such frenzied levels that they’re hypnotic on a moment-to-moment basis even if the broad outlines of the story get lost in the process. Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns” are Westerns taken to their stylistic extreme, and while “extreme” is a word that’s often associated with Miike’s films, Sukiyaki Western Django is a rarity- a Miike film that feels too tame. It’s entertaining enough, and the final shootout is good as these things go, but overall it’s a little disappointing. I’ve gone on record as a rabid fan of Audition, but with each subsequent Miike film I see I’ve come to realize that that film’s tight directorial control and bold formal structure was a rarity in his work. Sadly, Sukiyaki Western Django needed a more assured hand on the reins.
In my ongoing effort to see as many 2008 films as possible, I’ve decided to change the rules a bit this time around. Below, I’ve listed five of the most intriguing titles from the last four Reviews By Request polls (sorry, no House Bunny). As usual, I’m asking you to pick your favorite, but rather than only writing up the top vote-getter, I’ll write up the top three, one per week for the next three weeks. So, what’ll it be?
As always, feel free to sound off in the comments section. See you next week!
