Movie: Ichi the killer

Rating: 4/6
A part of my brain cringes at the disturbingness of this movie, while the other part yells “hahaha! Aaawesome!”, and it’s kind of hard to decide which part to listen to.

Simply explained, the story features two sides.
On one side you have a crazy guy named Ichi.
He’s a killer, if you didn’t guess it.
He is controlled by a clever man, who for some reason persuades him to think whoever needs to be killed is a bad-guy.
On the other side we have Anjo’s yakuza gang, who are looking for their boss, Anjo, whom is missing.
The search eventually turns into more of a revenge-quest for Ichi.
The yakuza gang is led by Kakihara, a brutal sadomasochist, and the one featured on the cover.
We follow these guys through the movie, and the means they use to close in on each others trail.

I felt kind of bad for Ichi through bits of the movie. He is clearly mentally ill, and might seem as a nice guy deep down. The feeling wears off though, as he’s also incredibly disgusting on many levels. I shall say no more. Don’t want to spoil anything.

Kakihara, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly violent. He likes pain, both giving and receiving it, both of which are shown through several well made scenes. This doesn’t really change, and we aren’t shown any reason for him being this way. Some hints may lay around, but not clear enough to make me over-analyze. Still, he’s my favorite character. How he seems like a kid on Christmas Eve at the thought of pain is really what makes the hilarity in this movie.

The acting on most parts are quite good, I’ll have to check out some of the actors later(including Asano Tadenobu). I’m not an expert judge on acting though, and often focus more on the character they play, so some might disagree. For the record, there might be only one or two sane characters in the whole script, except from those not given any lines. This creates the opportunity for quite a lot of gross scenes, which is why the movie is so famous.

It’s hard to come up with a lot of good things about the movie, apart from the gore, but that’s what most of the movie is about. The rest are really just reasons for the gore, which is fine, as every movie needs a storyline. And the blood and killing weren’t really as bad as I feared. It was pretty well made, apart from some scenes where one can see it’s animated. You’ll have to expect some differences in animation quality when the movie is from 2001.
Even though there is torture in this movie, it's in most cases distracted by events around, which makes it tolerabe. In most cases.
I really didn’t understand the ending though.
I had to look it up in Wikipedia, hehe.

All in all, I guess I could recommend watching this movie, but that’s mostly because it’s often mentioned. Even if it’s not mentioned, it might be worth watching in order to mention it yourself.
Financially, it might also be a good choice, as you don’t have to bother bringing snacks. You won’t eat it anyway.

Trailer: (the beginning of the trailer looks dull, but the movie is cooler)


Can be found on youtube:

and elsewhere