You can't be prolific and consistent; That's just common sense. And when you're as insanely prolific as Takashi Miike... well, you're definitely going to have some turds composting in between the folds of your bloated filmography. To reach those sort of numbers, you simply can't give a fuck about what you're making a lot of the time.
If Blade of the Immortal was Miike's 100th film, then by my count As the Gods Will was his 94th - the second and final film he made on 2014. And it is an absolute stinker.
Shun (Sôta Fukushi) is a whiny piece of shit of a high-schooler, one of those insufferable "woe is me, my life is so boooooring" pieces of shit characters that's got not one but two beautiful girls pining for him*. So of course he gets a sort of supernatural intervention, in the form a group of sentient toys that hijack all the high schools in the world and force the students in them to play children's games... to the death.
It actually starts out pretty promising! Juvenile, sure, but it opens up in media res, with a bunch of students up to their ankles in beheaded classmates, and cuts back and forth in a pretty engaging way until it's clear that an animated daruma doll popped out of a teacher's head and is now playing red light, green light with the kids - and if it catches anyone of them moving, their heads explode in a shower of blood and red marbles.
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| I give this movie one finger out of ten. Doesn't even deserve two. |
But as soon as we're all caught up, the kids start talking and the script (by Hiroyuki Yatsu) rears its misshapen, incompetent head. It's based on a Manga by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Akeji Fujimura, and holy fuck is that ever obvious; all the typical bottom-of-the-barrel formulaic manga stench wafts out and immediately overpowers anything else, voiding any chance that this could ever be any good; Constant pauses (...), people just muttering each other's names and constantly explaining what just happened to each other, tropes instead of characters, screaming, cheap melodrama. Plot holes, constant dramatic emphasis, bullshit philosophies and folks acting in deeply stupid ways to 'enhance' the drama. Fuck. This. Shit.
Plotwise, Shun keeps making it through increasingly bizarre, deadly games (shooting hoops with a giant good luck cat statue, playing werewolf with an extreme snowboarding bear) and running into fellow high-school survivors - two love interests (Shoko Takase and Hirona Yamazaki) and Takeru (Ryunosuke Kamiki), your stereotypical anime psycho. But honestly, the only game that holds interest is the first one. While things do get admirably ridiculous now and again - you can see why this, on paper, would have caught Miike's eye - unfortunately it's all diminishing returns after that first game.
This might call to mind Squid Games, but... honestly? It's just more tripe in the vein of Battle Royale (a movie I personally kind of despise, but is still miles better than this) - teens forced to kill each other to arbitrary and bizarre rules equals easy symbolism without the need to have anything to say; let the critics and viewers fall over each other to say it for you.
Worst of all is that Miike is on full professional mode and shows way too much restraint by only implying most of the carnage, or diluting it with magical realist touches like the red marbles at the beginning (which, to be honest, was pretty cool; it's the only good one, though). Dammit, I want to see those pieces of shit get carved into smaller pieces of shit; Here, when someone gets a deadly case of the splits, we never see flesh tearing or get to linger on the aftermath- just a glimpse of a little blood pooling. This, from the guy who brought us Ichi the Killer! Who the fuck thought it'd be a good idea to hobble him with the Japanese equivalent of a PG13 rating?
It's not a complete complete waste of time. There's flashes of fun every now and then, some amusing cruelty, and the material brings out a little of Miike's anarchic spirit every now and then. The X-TREME polar bear is funny. Not enough - not even nearly enough to justify watching the whole thing, though.
I'm sure it's not even near the bottom of this director's films quality-wise - I've only seen, at a guess, twenty or so, and the very worst probably never made it out of Japan. But it definitely is the worst one of his I've seen, and I really wouldn't want to see him doing worse than this turgid, bloated (almost two hours!), inane, fucking stupid pile of reheated, anime tropes that were never above piss-poor to begin with.
*: Also, he sucks at Resident Evil 6, and by extension sucks at choosing Resident Evil games. Fuck that dude.
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