We ran to see if Miike, in this film, was back to the Miike we loved so much. But no, it’s yet another film directed for food reasons, and on autopilot. The review of Lumberjack the Monster by Federico Gironi.
There was a period, between the end of the nineties and the mid-noughties, in which for cinephiles all over the world Takashi Miike was essentially a deity. We weren’t wrong: even today films like Auditions, Gozu or Big Bang Love Juvenile Ajust to name three titles, give you goosebumps due to their themes, style, courage and desire to push the boundaries of cinema.
Then the years passed, Miike continued to work like a madman (currently IMDb credits him with 115 directions), but the results were no longer up to the standards of that extraordinary period. Normal, perhaps, especially for someone like the Japanese, who has always declared that he makes films to eat.
Yet, for us older people who experienced that season live, the arrival of a new Miike film always sends a shiver down our spines: do you want to see this be the good time that Takashi surprises us again? And so, we run to see: in this case up Netflixwhere he surprisingly appeared Lumberjack the Monster. But no, this is not the film in which Miike returned to the Miike we loved.
The plot (taken from a novel by Mayusuke Kurai adapted by Hiroyoshi Koiwai), it must be said, is delusional enough: protagonists they are a psychopathic lawyer, a sort of Japanese Patrick Batemanit’s a masked serial killer like the horrible protagonist of a children’s book who goes around killing people and taking away their brains. The former discovers that he has become a target for the latter, and he has no intention of getting killed easily. Then there are chips implanted in the brain, in the area that regulates morality and empathy, a beautiful police profiler, detectives with quick methods and doctors with the smell of madness.
In short, we could have fun.
And, to be honest, we have fun here and there too, and not just on the occasion of very sporadic (don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise) splashes of blood at very high pressure.
We have fun when Miike shuffles the cards, regardless of even narrative coherence, for the sole purpose of having a little fun himself, of following a psyche and an idea of cinema which, whatever happens, are certainly not linear and traditional.
We have some fun following certain trajectories of the psychopathic lawyer, who is called Akira and is played by a diabolical Kazuya Kamenashi; especially when she cruelly flirts with the beautiful profiler played by Nanao.
An eyebrow is raised, at times, in some physical confrontation between Akira and the masked killer.
And yet.
But it must be admitted, for the sake of Miike himself, that here the Japanese went on autopilot autopilotis that Lumberjack the Monster ends up directly in the bin of his most anonymous and commercial films. And the whole discussion, a bit blunt and obvious, on the idea of morality, on the possibility of a second life in the course of which to make amends for the mistakes of the first, on a society that seems to want to produce psychopathy in series, in laboratories, they get wasted a bit.
What remains of Lumberjack the Monster is a nice pessimistic ending, and the illustrations created specifically for the film of the children’s book which is somewhat the common thread of the whole story.
Commissioned product for commissioned product, Miike did much better in the Connect series, which you can still watch on streaming, but on Disney+.
