Beat Takeshi is a famous actor who has a nice lifestyle travelling in his Rolls Royce cars from job to job. One day he meets a man who looks exactly like him except he has blonde hair called Kitano – an aspiring actor who works in a convenience store. His personality is the exact opposite– quite meek and unassuming. He finds difficulty in getting acting jobs because he looks too similar to Takeshi and because of his quiet personality. A dying blood soaked gangster comes into his convenience store one night and asks for the toilet. Kitano finds a bag full of guns on the gangster and takes them. Suddenly he finds the confidence he sorely lacked before as people start thinking he’s the real Beat Takeshi when he’s waving his gun around. He even finds that those that looked down on him before have a new found respect for him. Not that it matters as Kitano uses the guns to kill the people he found annoying in his life. Then things begin to get even weirder…….
This funny and at times strange satire comedy movie has Takeshi Kitano parodying his acting career to date (well to 2005 anyway at the time this movie came out) and making fun of himself if he wasn’t an actor. He plays 2 characters and it’s hard to say which is the real Takeshi Kitano as reality begins to blur. The plot is all over the place and it’s hard at times to keep up with what’s going on. Is Kitano dreaming about being Beat Takeshi or are there two people with the same name running around at the same time? After a while you’ll find its best not to try and make sense of things and it’s better to let it go over your head and just enjoy the wild and fun ride. Perhaps it was Takeshi Kitano’s intention for the movie not to make any sense for the viewer? It could be that he is trying to tell us all that even with the serious yakuza movies he’s done, he is deep down but a clown judging by several scenes incorporating Kitano as a clown. By the climax it gets too surreal that the story goes absolutely nowhere and I did think that it got a little bit boring as well. I still don’t understand what the WWII scene at the beginning and the end of the movie is all about? I believe even Takeshi Kitano questioned himself what the hell he had made when viewing this movie. People with no previous experience of his movies will have a hard time with this one. It would be best to watch some of his classics and then come back to this movie. Whilst the references to his movies and cameos are amusing to watch, the movie did get too weird (and dare I say very David Lynch-like) and repetitive for my liking by the end.
Takeshi Kitano is always great to watch and the rest of the cast who play the supporting characters are regulars from his previous movies. By the end, the character of Kitano has blown them all away several times over with his array of weapons which did get a little bit annoying.
Takeshis’ does entertain and there is plenty of humour involved but it’s just too random, bizarre and isn’t cohesive enough for the casual viewer. It’s a very creative, almost arty movie from Kitano. One for open-minded people and his die-hard fans only.
Sadako’s Rating: 3 stars out of 5
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