Smuggler

Director: Katsuhito Ishii
Starring: Satoshi Tsumabuki, Masanobu Ando, Masatoshi Nagase
Time Out rating:

Typical: one minute you're raking in the yen on a rigged pachinko machine, the next you're having to work off debts by ferrying chopped-up yakuza torsos around the country. Such is the plight of 25-year-old dropout Kinuta (Satoshi Tsumabuki), whose new vocation as a corpse conveyor also requires him to navigate a world of duplicitous gangsters, including psychotic enforcer Kawashima (Masahiro Takashima), surly boss's moll Chiharu (Hikari Mitsushima) and superhuman Chinese assassin Spine (Masanobu Ando).

Katsuhito Ishii's adaptation of the manga by Shohei Manabe preserves – and in some cases amplifies – the violence of its source material, while exchanging the more nihilistic moments for slapstick humour. It's an awkward mixture, and the A Taste of Tea director does far better at making his audience wince than at mustering laughs. An early setpiece in which Ando's character dispatches a roomful of yakuza is shot in dazzling slow-motion, finding a grotesque visual poetry in every fracturing jaw and spurt of bile; too bad that it's preceded by a mirthless skit involving a cigarette-chomping mob boss who doesn't like other people smoking in his presence.

The latter is one of the few moments where Ishii deviates from Manabe's original narrative, and like his other inventions it feels unnecessary: money lender Yamaoka is transformed from the comic's squat middle-aged man into an adult goth-lolita (Yasuko Matsuyuki), Spine now sees dead people, and there's a superfluous gay subplot that comes out of nowhere only to be forgotten a couple of minutes later. The most unwelcome variation comes in the climactic torture sequence, which Ishii turns into a gruesomely protracted affair that may get Saw fanboys salivating but is likely to send others heading for the exit.

Of the cast, it's the support characters who stand out the most, for reasons both good (Masatoshi Nagase's gruff smuggling veteran, Takashima's bug-eyed villain) and bad (Tatsuya Gashuin's grating, anime-style comedy sidekick). Tsumabuki is fast reaching the point where his performances are indistinguishable from one another, and his nice-guy loser protagonist is too bland to seem worth caring about. Rather, it's Ando who really steals the show. Best known to Western audiences as the mop-haired sociopath in Battle Royale, the actor brings an intensity and bristling physicality to his role as the scarred psycho-killer that overshadows everything else on screen. It's the one real revelation in a film that will satisfy genre fans, yet feels like it could – and should – have been a lot more fun than it actually is.

Smuggler is released nationwide on October 22