Review #434: 'The City of Lost Souls' (2000)

Japanese director Takashi Miike has directed a phenomenal 80 films in his 21-year career, with genres ranging from comedy to yakuza, and from horror to period samurai. Although he is a highly-rated auteur, known for crazy camera-work, bizarre plot devices, and extreme violence, his films do tend to differ vastly in quality. His understated masterpiece Audition (1999) was a slowly-paced, thoughtful romantic drama that switched to cringe-inducing horror in the blink of an eye. Audition is one of the finest films to come out of the relatively unmemorable 1990's, and showed Miike's skill in luring an unsuspecting audience into a safe place, to then paralyse you and chicken-wiring your foot off. But his filmography is peppered with some rather dull offerings, and although they tend to show moments of offbeat genius, they lack in heart. The City of Lost Souls, also known as The City of Strangers, is an example of this.

Brazilian madman Mario (Teah), rescues his beautiful Japanese girlfriend Kei (Michelle Reis) from being deported in a daring bus hijack. Wanting to escape the dangers of Japan and flee to Australia, the two find themselves caught in the middle of some Chinese gangsters led by Ko (Mitsuhiro Oikawa) who are in the middle of a drug deal with Japanese hothead Fushimi (Koji Kikkawa). Mario gatecrashes the deal and steals the dope for himself, selling it to admiring Brazilian TV anchor Sanchez (Marcio Rosario). When Sanchez tries to sell the dope back to Ko, the gangsters try to lure the elusive Mario out of his hiding place by kidnapping his ex-girlfriend's blind daughter.

With slight nods to the earlier works of John Woo, Miike's yakuza comedy thriller employs the usual genre traits with slow-motion, Mexican stand-off's, and Asians-in-shades dominating throughout. But this isn't action captured in the same operatic way as Woo's films, this is laced with hyper-kinetic editing, black humour, and CGI cock-fighting, and all cut between seemingly random scenes and simply odd moments. Although this type of thing would usual make a film all the more interesting, here it seems like Miike is doing what he can to try and hide the rather thin plot. Fair play to him though, there doesn't seem to be a camera-angle he's scared to exploit, but it's all thrown at the audience as if Miike believes his audience has the attention-span of a child on blue Smarties. And a badly computer generated cock doing a Matrix-esque gravity-defying kick is not funny.


Directed by: Takashi Miike
Starring: Teah, Michelle Reis, Mitsuhiro Oikawa, Kôji Kikkawa
Country: Japan

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie