Sukiyaki Western Django

Hard as it may be to imagine, Sukiyaki Western Django just might be Takashi Miike’s most inept and flat-out boring effort to date – which is no small feat, really, given the presence of such failures as 2000’s Dead or Alive and 2003’s Gozu within the director’s bloated filmography. Miike’s lack of talent has, thus far in his woefully prolific career, been hidden behind a smokescreen of relentless output, as the filmmaker generally tends to crank out four or five movies a year. Sukiyaki Western Django, which has been filmed entirely in English, though most of the actors clearly aren’t native speakers of the language, follows a mysterious stranger (Hideaki Ito) as he rolls into a prototypically violent Old West Town, where he quickly finds himself caught smack-dab in the middle of a feud between two warring clans. Miike’s various stylistic choices (eg the garish production design and eye-bleeding visuals) ensure that Sukiyaki Western Django wears out its welcome almost immediately, while the various performances range from awful to flat-out inexcusable (this also applies to guest star Quentin Tarantino, whose over-the-top work here makes one long for the subtlety and nuance of his previous stints as an actor). Of course, one might’ve been willing to overlook the film’s myriad of deficiencies were any of this even remotely fun but it’s just not; it’s oppressive and tedious and interminable.

no stars out of ****