By Tristan Bishop
Japanese director Sion Sono has been gradually making an international name for himself since the eighties. He really started attracting attention in 2001 with the gruesome and creepy Suicide Club, riding the J-horror wave that exploded after Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998), and in recent years has seen enormous critical success with 2010’s cartoony-yet-bleak serial killer film Cold Fish (2010) and last year’s ultra-violent gangster thriller Why Don’t You Play In Hell. Despite being a favourite of more serious film critics, Sono, like his fellow countryman Takashi Miike, isn’t afraid of wading into more extreme waters, and so, for his latest effort, has delivered us what can only be described as a gangsta rap musical/martial arts hybrid.
Adapted from Santa Inoue’s manga series of the same name by Sono himself, Tokyo Tribe takes place in an alternate universe Tokyo, where different districts are ruled by their own gangs (bringing to mind Walter Hill’s The Warriors). The hulking Merra, leader of the Wu-Ronz (played by Ryohei Suzuki, who you may recognise from the outrageously entertaining HK Kamen : Forbidden Superhero), who dresses in not much more than a thong, teams up with Buppa, a rich, corpulent gangster (and leader of the eponymously-named Buppa Town), who likes to enslave (and occasionally eat) schoolgirls, and has a son who collects people as ‘living furniture’. Together they plan to rule over the whole of Tokyo, and their first plot is to do away with Kai (the amusingly named Japanese rapper Young Dais), mild-mannered and peace-loving leader of Murashino Saru, who are, in the words of the young chap who acts as a Greek chorus (in rhyme, of course) throughout the film, ‘into love’. Merra sets a trap to enslave Kai in a local brothel, using a girl named Erika who was kidnapped off the street. Unfortunately this backfires somewhat, as Merra ends up killing Kai’s friend Tera instead (who, it transpires, was known and loved amongst all the gangs in Tokyo). In a further complication, Erika turns out to not only be an expert martial artist, but also the daughter of the ‘high priest’, who, it seems, is a sort of dark lord of Japan, and who Buppa is in league with. These events eventually escalate into all-out war amongst the gangs of Tokyo, and the already dangerous neon streets explode into an orgy of violence.
The idea of a ‘battle rap’ musical may seem fairly new, but, let’s face it, Shakespeare had his characters delivering rhyming couplets a fair while before Sono was walking this Earth. However, I’m pretty sure Shakespeare never had these verses delivered in time to huge banging trap-hop beats. Let’s be fully clear here – if you hate hip-hop, this is not the film for you. The music and culture permeates every single frame of the film, and the rap-phobic amongst us will be instantly turned-off. Thankfully, for those who like their beats and rhymes, the music here (from the BCDMG collective) is truly excellent- The end song is still stuck in my head three days after seeing the film (ok, it helps that the chorus is in English and repeated a lot). Now I don’t know more than five words of Japanese, so I don’t feel I’m fully able to appreciate the rap skills of all of the actors, but to my ears they range from excellent to a bit clumsy, which is actually how I feel about the film itself. Sono is undoubtedly an excellent visual stylist; long panning shots over the vibrant slums are occasionally breath-taking, but they are tempered by an over-reliance on CGI effects, something which is forgivable in very low-budget productions, but Tokyo Tribe certainly appears to have had quite a lot of money spent on it in all other departments, so it’s disappointing when CGI blood spurts (and, at one admittedly funny point, a ‘bling’ tank) look so out of place – especially when you remember how well the Japanese samurai films of the 1970’s pulled these off.
My other issue with Tokyo Tribe could actually be an accusation levelled at much of mainstream hip-hop over the last twenty years – the juvenile obsession with (forgive me, but this is contextual) ‘bitches’. The B word turns up frequently as a slur (in addition to one gay slur spoken by the otherwise very likeable Greek Chorus character), and, despite the awesome, arse-kicking Erika and an all-female badass gang called the Giri Giri Girls, whose leader sports a whip and fetish gear, most of the girls in the film are there for window dressing or to be abused – one has to stop and raise an eyebrow when Sono features THREE separate scenes with flick-knives being drawn across bare female breasts. Of course those familiar with Japanese cinema will point out that this is a Nikkatsu Studios film, and is pretty tame in that area compared to their output from 30-40 years ago, but when you’ve got some excellent female characters being disappointingly underused it becomes more of an annoyance.
Gripes aside, I have to say I LOVED Tokyo Tribe from the halfway point onwards – it’s vibrant, colourful, loud and ridiculous as only the Japanese can do. At points it feels like the characters from Miike’s Ichi The Killer (2001) remaking West Side Story, and the second half is pretty much a full-on martial arts sequence – some of which is truly impressive – and the ending sequence is full-on hilarious in its comment on the macho nature of gang culture and hip-hop. I would recommend catching Tokyo Tribe on the big screen, or at the very least plugging into some big speakers at home and turning it up, because the loud bass and aggressive beats really hammer the action home. If you’re looking for a brash and tasteless, yet colourful and stylish good time, this is the tribe to party with.
Tokyo Tribe goes on limited theatrical release in the UK and Eire on 8th May 2015, from Eureka.