Wara no Tate

Director: Takashi Miike
Starring: Takao Osawa, Nanako Matsushima, Tatsuya Fujiwara
Time Out rating:
English title: Straw Shield

What happened to Takashi Miike? How did the auteur responsible for the ingeniously twisted Audition and Ichi the Killer end up producing big-budget popcorn fodder whose main selling point is its technical competence? Wara no Tate might be the director's most expensive production to date. Huge fleets of police vehicles are summoned, entire highways and stations closed off: a logistical effort that – by the penny-pinching standards of contemporary Japanese cinema – is almost Michael Bay-esque in its largesse. But it's all so empty, so stupid, so utterly forgettable.

The plot, a gruyere-like congealment of absurdities from start to finish, revolves around a police unit who have to escort a criminal from Fukuoka to Tokyo in 48 hours. And not just any criminal: he may look like notorious ham Tatsuya Fujiwara, but he's got a billion yen bounty on his head, courtesy of the well-connected eminence gris whose granddaughter he's suspected of murdering. When even hospital staff and police officers start lining up for their chance to dispatch this ‘human scum’ and claim the bounty – and with a smartphone app helping them keep track of their target – it's clear that our heroes have a tough job ahead of them. Mind you, they seem to make it tougher for themselves at every given opportunity.

Inexplicable procedural lapses abound (forget taking a helicopter: let's hop on the bullet train!), while the cast struggle to convince as supposedly elite cops. Takao Osawa makes for a commanding enough lead, in a cut-price Jack Bauer kind of way, but Nanako Matsushima is disastrously weedy as his sidekick, while Kento Nagayama's hot-headed youngster would never have made it through police school. Fujiwara, for the record, is no less overwrought than in every other film he's appeared in, though he's done few favours by a script that seems intent on rewiring his character's personality with every new scene.

If you can ignore the glaring inconsistencies and dodgy casting, Wara no Tate is, at least, a slickly entertaining bit of crap. Barring a preference for wide-aperture close-ups that leaves a few scenes out of focus, the film is decently – and occasionally quite excitingly – shot; Miike knows his way around an action sequence far better than the likes of Gantz's Shinsuke Sato. Timed to hit cinemas for the Golden Week holidays, Wara no Tate seems guaranteed a good return at the domestic box office, and apparently that's enough for Miike these days. But he's capable of so much more: even as a genre film this is merely average. Coming from the man once considered amongst the most exciting Japanese directors of his generation, it's a bit of a downer.

Wara no Tate opens nationwide on April 26