The Price We Pay

 If there's a pawn shot in a movie, odds are something violent is going to happen in it. In Ryûhei Kitamura's The Price We Pay, it's a botched robbery.

 Three robbers go in: Cody (Stephen Dorff), the professional, principled one, Alex (Emile Hirsch), the hotheaded psycho, and John (Jesse Kinser), the fuck-up who gets shot in the leg and brought in a getaway driver that leaves them all in a lurch as soon as guns are fired.

 Alex unnecessarily kills an innocent man, and is about to kill another person, Grace (Gigi Zumbado) until Cody steps in and points out they may need a hostage and alternate means of egress.

 The trio and their captive make it far into the New Mexico back roads before their car breaks down, and then they take shelter in a nearby farm where a fidgety teen (Tyler Sanders, who died a few months after production wrapped - the film is dedicated to him) nervously lets them take over one of the farmhand bungalows.

 It's clear that there's something iffy even before a curious Alex discovers a huge underground facility under the barn. Our heroes have stumbled into an organ harvesting operation, and soon they're all strapped into gurneys under the tender care of the Doctor (Vernon Wells) and his gigantic underling.

 Yes, this movie can accurately be summarized as what if From Dusk Till Dawn but if it left-turned into Hostel instead.

 Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of Hostel-style "hey, all the characters are now helpless captives, let's torture them for a bit until they manage to find a way out!" plots. There's some pretty impressive carnage (and a really fun use of a gas canister) once the tables are turned, but it's too little, too late. The script, by Christopher Jolley, fails to give any of the characters any depth, and completely lacks the intelligence needed for any of the verbal sparring - be it between Cody and Alex, Grace and the kid, or anyone and The Doctor - to be halfway entertaining or even tense. And the monologue that gives the movie its title is just painful.

 There's also the fact that... well, nothing much happens throughout. And that, coupled with a dour, joyless tone kind of robs the film the chance to devolve into the sort of b-movie fun it could have gone for.

 Dorff and Hirsch are both credited as producers, and they both give themselves fairly showy roles. They do well, as does Zumbado, but none of them can do much to prevent their characters from simultaneously feeling both poorly defined and like walking clichés.

 I'm not a huge fan of Kitamura as a director, though I do respect that he's kept some of that deranged excess and energy from Versus. That excess unfortunately carries over to the style here (jittery zooms, whip pans, choppy editing). It's a shame, especially when the first half showed better filmmaking. It didn't bother me  too much, but I didn't enjoy it either. Which, come to think of it, is basically how I'd describe the movie as a whole.

Versus

 Versus was pretty well received back when it came out - I remember a lot of acquaintances talking about it, and people kept recommending it to me because I liked 'that Japanese stuff'.

 Unfortunately, Anime doesn't tend to be among the Japanese stuff I like. And man, is this movie ever anime-damaged. A disappointment twenty-odd years in the making.

 You can tell exactly what director Ryûhei Kitamura was into back then by watching this: A lot of Matrix, a lot of Tarantino, a lot of Evil Dead, a little of chanbara (samurai) films. Which, fair enough, that's pretty much what all of us nerds- pardon me, geeks, were into. But Kitamura only lifts the shallowest, most juvenile elements for his pastiche, and besides some fun energy and gore, he doesn't really bring much else.
 How shallow of a pastiche is it? When our hero has to find some clothes, the first thing he comes across is a leather trenchcoat.

There be wankers in them woods.

  There's an opening crawl that's so elaborate and pointless it plays as parody; The plot is some nonsense about an ancient confrontation between an evil Shinto priest (Hideo Sakaki) and a pure hearted samurai (Tak Sakaguchi) - the priest wants to control a portal between life and death, the Samurai wants to protect his lady (Chieko Misaka), whose blood is needed for the priest's evil ritual. Oh, and there's zombies because the portal doesn't let anyone in these woods die properly.

 That's just the prologue. These people, and some other mooks, all reincarnate many centuries later - The Samurai as an escaped convict, almost everyone else as Yakuza, and the girl as... a girl they've kidnapped.

 None of them are aware of what's happening, except the priest, who is a yakuza boss this time around, and is pulling the strings to finally do whatever it is he wants to do.

 But it takes a while for the movie to get to that. First we must endure a long stretch where they posture for ages without doing anything, trying to bring some Tarantino cool to the movie by way of tired old anime tropes. Holy shit is it painful to watch.
 I hate the main character with a passion - he's one of those manga antiheroes that's so cool, so above it all they come across as almost narcoleptic, constantly whining about having to do stuff... an absolute piece of shit character. The girl is a blank, constantly waiting for this shitstain to validate her, and the mooks are a one-dimensional collection of anime stock characters without a single shred of charisma between them. You've got the serious, honorable one, the serious one with glasses and long hair, the psychotic clown who looks like he might pull a face muscle from all his mugging, the incompetent one that's so caught up in his panic attack that he looks almost feral... OK, that last one at least was entertaining to watch. Probably not in the way intended, but as trainwrecks go it's a fun one.

 Then there's another bunch of characters that appear out of the blue. Literally, I have no idea what they're doing in this movie, and they barely interact with the... let's call it story. I'd complain, but they're way more fun and interesting than any of the main characters, with the highlight being a psycho pixie (Hoshimi Asai) who turns up and starts punching people. No posturing, no bullshit, only punching. She gets a really funny death, too.

 It's pretty clear the plot in this doesn't matter in the least - it's just an excuse to string together the scenes Kitamura wanted to do; lots of fights and shootouts, all reasonably fun but without any real choreography. It's all about looking cool, not doing cool stuff, which is a shame because they do put in some effort - there's even some wirework involved.

 For your money you also get Zombie killing, some silly jokes (some of them even work!) and lots of very over-the-top gore. Chintzy, very Matrix-inspired techno music, camera work that's all over the place (including a pretty well done Michael Bay homage, of all things) and all the forest scenery you could possibly want.

 I like the movie's energy, at least when it gets going, and I like some of its goofy humour. I wanted to like its "let's go to the woods and film some cool shit" ethos. Hell, I'd even agree that some of it does manage to be cool, when it's not trying too hard. Shave off an hour, preferably all the early scenes with the Yakuza, and it'd be watchable.