Ichi the Killer
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Template:Infobox Movie (2) Ichi the Killer (2001) (also Koroshiya Ichi or 殺し屋１) is a highly controversial film directed by Takashi Miike and adapted from a manga by Hideo Yamamoto.
The film stars Tadanobu Asano as Kakihara, a sadomasochist yakuza enforcer who enjoys giving and receiving pain in about equal measure. To reinforce this, he is shown as having his mouth widenend on both sides by several inches, with his cheeks held together with piercings. Kakihara's boss Anjo vanishes one night after he is murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion. A mysterious group arrives and cleans up all evidence of the murder, and takes the 3 million yen Anjo had in his room.
Many of Kakihara's compatriots, including his English and Chinese-speaking girlfriend Karen (Alien Sun), suspect that Anjo simply took the money and ran, but Kakihara is convinced the man is alive. His investigation leads him to brutally torture a member of a rival clan, Suzuki (Susumu Terajima) by suspending him from a ceiling by putting metal hooks through the man's back, shoving stilettoes through his body, and throwing boiling grease (from a meal of tempura) on him. (In an example of the film's extremely black humor, when asked what he is doing, Kakihara responds nonchalantly, "Just a little torture, nothing special.")
To make restitution, Kakihara slices off part of his tongue and offers it to Suzuki's boss (Jun Kunimura). However, the man who tipped Kakihara off to Suzuki and may have more real information, a disheleved old man nicknamed Jijii (Shinya Tsukamoto), is nowhere to be found.
Jijii is, as it turns out, secretly orchestrating events. Under his wing is a young man, Ichi (Nao Omori), a confused and apparently psychotic individual who is normally unassuming and cowardly, but becomes homicidal when enraged (and who has crying fits after committing his murders). Ichi outfits himself in a rubber suit with shoes that have razors concealed in the heels, and after spying on a pimp brutalizing a prostitute kills first the pimp, then the girl. Jijii has so manipulated Ichi as to confuse sexual arousal with homicidal lust in him, and accomplished this by creating a false memory in him of witnessing a rape in high school -- which he felt ashamed for wanting to participate in rather than stop.
Kakihara is eventually thrown out of the syndicate for his transgressions, but not before catching word of Ichi. He becomes fascinated with this "total sadist," since perhaps through him he can finally find the ultimate pain he has been seeking -- one which neither his girlfriend nor his boss could give him. In a related plot development, Jijii attempts to get better control over Ichi by having Karen seduce him, but the plan backfires horribly and Karen is slaughtered.
Kakihara, along with two corrupt police-detective twin brothers, finds a prostitute connected with Jijii's gang. In one of the film's more disturbing scenes, they torture her for information (primarily by cutting her nipples off). They find one of Jijii's henchmen and torture him to find out where Ichi is. However, at this point Ichi shows up at Kakihara's compound. Ichi and Kakihara eventually confront each other on a rooftop. The film then ostensibly departs from literal reality and gives us a showdown that appears to take place in the minds of one or the other of the main characters, but it remains deliberately obscure which.
Trivia
- As a publicity gimmick, barf bags were handed out at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) to those attending the midnight screening of this film.
- When Kakihara's cell phone rings, the ringtone is the movie's theme song.
- The fenced-in rooftop where Kakihara and Ichi battle is the same one seen in Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive: Hanzaisha (1999), where three policemen talk about murder and the Yakuza.
- For the sequence in which his character is suspended from hooks and tortured, actor Susumu Terajima required twelve hours of makeup and other preparation, and then spent twelve more hours shooting the scene.
- The name Ichi means 1 which is why he wears the yellow number 1 on his costume.
- Director Takashi Miike reveals on the US TokyoShock DVD release that the semen used in the close-up during the intro sequence, when the film's title raises out of a puddle of semen, is real.
- Director Takashi Miike originally intended to have the author of the original manga, Hideo Yamamoto, to write a script entirely in manga form, but the idea fell through when Yamamoto felt he could not complete it due to writer's block.