Original title: Ôkami yakuza: Koroshi wa ore ga yaru
A handful of men from the Yakuza group of Izumi (Koji Nanbara) are murdered in brutal and particularly ruthless fashion. Izumi suspects a rival gang of the killings, but in truth, it is his past coming to roost. A couple of years ago, Izumi’s gang wiped out the Himuro group, and Boss Himuro’s son Gosuke (Sonny Chiba) has now returned to take bloody vengeance on his father’s killer, even though he never wanted anything to do with the yakuza life before. Gosuke’s mood does not improve when he realizes that his enemies also raped his sister and then sold her into a life of drugs, slavery and prostitution.
So it comes as little surprise he’s willing to do absolutely anything to destroy the man responsible for his family’s ruin, be it heating up the cold gang war between Izumi and his enemies, kidnapping his enemy’s teenage daughter, or ramming a knife in the back of whomever he deems more useful that way.
This is pretty early in Sonny Chiba’s transformation from more prospective matinee idol and action comedy role actor to the ruthless yet typically awesome bastards he would go on to play for large parts of his career. His Gosuke comes out fully formed already, committing brutal and sometimes genuinely vile acts out of his lust for revenge and a clearly destructive sense of honour, and only getting away with the audience sympathy for it because he’s Sonny Chiba and because his enemies are even worse. Visually, Gosuke is styled very much as a Spaghetti Western hero, predominantly Django, and Chiba plays him as a brooding, glowering presence who doesn’t communicate in the expected angry, dramatic shouts and grunts but speaks quietly, softly and monotonously, like a guy who holds on to control of his manner tightly and lets his violence shout for itself. It’s an effective approach to the role that makes Gosuke feel even more frightening, suggesting a man who could stop his violence when he actually wanted to, but simply has given up trying - if he ever wanted to.
Apart from its protagonist’s visual styling, Yakuza Wolf is full of other obvious parallels to Italian Westerns, apparently coming full circle with influences particularly Kurosawa had on cinema in Europe and the United States; and thanks to this visual style, it is pretty clear that its director Ryuichi Takamori does mean Italy and not Yojimbo in the scenes where Gosuke plays one Yakuza gang against the other; let’s not even mention a climax where our hero has two ruined hands and guns his enemies down thanks to a home-made gun track. Morally, this is of a piece with the more extreme of the Italian western, showing the kind of nihilism I find best interpreted as an expression of intense anger at the state of the world.
As a director, Takamori isn’t one of the best doing this kind of material in Japan. It’s not that he’s not technically accomplished – you simply didn’t make studio movies in Japan if you weren’t – he’s just not quite as artful or intense, as good at putting subtext in pictures than the best of his peers at the time were. He’s still quite able to direct a series of scenes of carnage highly effectively and does make much of Chiba’s physical performance; just from time to time, particularly in the scenes that have most to do with less action-heavy yakuza cinema, things decelerate just a little too much, with scenes that suddenly don’t seem quite in rhythm with the rest of what we see. In other moments, particularly in the scenes that bring the traditional exploitation values of really uncomfortable sex into play, Takamori becomes nearly brilliant. Particularly the phantasmagorical scene in which Gosuke finds his psychologically destroyed sister in a sex dungeon is incredible, like something out of a nightmare – even before she, clearly not recognizing him, offers him a breast and asks him to sleep with her.
Obviously, these particular aesthetic pleasures are not meant for everyone.
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