MONTREAL — Wildly prolific, equally inconsistent, brazenly audacious, and sometimes crushingly dull, Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike is certainly anything but predictable. And while the director might be past his heyday when pictures like “Audition,” “Ichi The Killer,” “Visitor Q,” and “Happiness Of The Katakuris” would regularly earn space on stateside arthouse screens, Miike has hardly lost his touch for the extreme, violent and weird. Colleague Jessica Kiang flipped for his gonzo “Yakuza Apocalypse,” and while “As The Gods Will” is patchy, there are just enough bizarrely funny and bloody moments inside that fans should be encouraged to try and track it down.
Making its Canadian premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival, “As The Gods Will” is actually a couple of years old, opening in Japan in 2014, and hopscotching to various festivals over the past year or so. It’s without U.S. distribution, and unlikely to earn any, but it’s not for lack of flash. “As The Gods Will” opens inside a bloody classroom, where the heads of teenage students have been exploding, as the audience is dropped in media res to witness a brutal game of Red Light/Green Light conducted by a demonically possessed Daruma doll. As the students scream and scramble to survive and figure out how to stop the game, viewers are also trying to puzzle out what’s going on, and this immediacy is instantly captivating. But it doesn’t take long for that feeling to fade.
Based on the manga by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Akeji Fujimura, the screenplay by Hiroyuki Yatsu, for all its willingness to go way out there, feels episodic, which often drags the momentum of the film, even during its most outrageous moments. The story soon emerges that high school students across the globe have been mysteriously forced by an unknown outside power into competing in a series of deadly contests, with the survivors moving onto the next round. It’s “The Hunger Games” by way of “Battle Royale,” but those comparisons hardly do “As The Gods Will” justice; mixing in conspiracy theories, romance, and a big dose of comedy, this is a picture very much on its own wavelength, even if it stalls out far too frequently.
The point of interest for most Miike devotees will be in the bloodshed, and he doesn’t disappoint. He gleefully dispatches the teenage characters in a variety of twisted ways, some brutal, others hilarious, and sometimes both, but he maintains a handle on the film’s arch tone, which leans “As The Gods Will” away from drama, into something not quite camp, but definitely light on its feet. And given that he’s done pretty much every genre under the sun, and worked on everything from massive sets to intimate scenes, Miike also shows a firm handle on special effects, even if the budget does let him down from time to time.
However, the big issue with “As The Gods Will” is one you strip away the somewhat high concept, and decently sized body count, there’s not much there. Shun (Sota Fukushi), and his love interest Ichika (Hirona Yamazaki) are the leads of the movie, but are too blandly drawn to be of real interest across the feature length running time (Shun’s biggest problem is that he thinks life is too boring, while Ichika is mostly there to inspire his confidence; it’s an unengaging dynamic). While some potentially intriguing thematic concerns are ever so fleetingly glanced upon — terrorism, hysteria, false gods, the arbitrary nature of life and death, adolescent identity — the picture is more concerned with the next setpiece to linger on those ideas for too long. And as for the big questions around the narrative — why is this event happening? who is pulling the strings? what end is it serving? — the answers are kept hidden right through to the end of picture, which boldly opts for a cliffhanger climax, with a door open for a sequel, that at this point, seems quite unlikely to happen. It’s a deflating and somewhat cynical finish for a movie that semi-frequently shows itself to be inventive, mostly when it involves Miike putting his teenager characters through the paces.
Since completing “As The Gods Will,” Miike made the straight drama “The Lion Standing In The Wind,” went to Cannes with the aforementioned “Yakuza Apocalypse,” helmed the sci-fi horror “Terra Formers,” and is currently filming “Blade Of The Immortal,” a supernatural swordsman movie set in medieval Japan. It’s that eclecticism which keeps Miike an interesting one to watch, because even when his films don’t quite come together and work as a whole, he often still displays plenty of the spark which brought him recognition around the world. “As The Gods Will” is a minor film from a major talent, but few middle of the road efforts from directors manage to retain the kind of wholly original sensibility seen here, and have as much fun as Miike is while doing it. [C+]
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