Game On: Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Dir Takashi Miike, 1h40m, 2007)

The bad videogame movie is by no means a purely Western beast; there are no shortage of creaky adaptions of Japanese horror games like the luridly named Corpse Party, Fatal Frame, and Forbidden Siren, not to mention veritable stacks of anime movies and series based on everything from dating simulator Tokimeki Memorial to puzzle series Professor Layton, to the work that arguably broke anime into the west, Pokémon and its cinematic outings, topped by Pokémon the First Movie (1998). Whilst many of these adaptions, in Japan and beyond, remain animated like Mario's two animated outings, or rely heavily on CGI, for example the tremendously successful Sonic the Hedgehog and Five Nights at Freddie's (which also smartly goes for a mid-budget horror sensibility), these are still beholden to the summer blockbuster model. Elsewhere, one could simply circumnavigate the entire studio system in favour of word of mouth marketing and release, in the case of Mark Fischbach (alias Markiplier)'s tremendously successful and remarkably claustrophobic adaption of indie horror game Iron Lung.

Yet, one man in Japan has turned the adaption of videogame movies into something of a speciality. This is Takashi Miike, though to merely pigeonhole Miike for this is to ignore quite how maddenly large a body of work the director has, from ultra-violent horror, most infamously manga adaption Ichi the Killer (2001), that premiered at Cannes with branded bags to vomit into in hand, to grand samurai movies like Thirteen Assassins (2010) and yakuza tales, like the action-packed Dead or Alive and Crows series, the latter also based on a manga, and even films for younger audiences, most notably The Great Yokai War (2005), and most peculiarly, several series of children's tv franchise, Girls × Heroine, which Miike also acted as creator for. 

Straight to the punch: Kazuki Kitamura as yakuza protagonist, Kazuma Kiryu

Alongside his horror and samurai films, it is his adaptions of manga and videogames that are most notable in the West, and what better film to talk about that his 2007 adaption of the Yakuza franchise? Depicting the life of ex-Yakuza Kazuma Kiryu (here played by Kazuki Kitamura), the series is somewhat a culture shock to the newcomer, half hard-boiled Yakuza film in the vein of Miike's own Dead or Alive, Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine, and gritty but honourable saga, Battles Without Honor and Humanity, directed by Kinji Fukasaku, half a bewildering and occasionally affecting crash through Japan's weirder side, from new age cults to idols to battling a legendary bear, not to mention a bewildering number of pastimes to take part in, from slotcar racing and karaoke to running an entire property empire, with a chicken in tow (seriously), to running an entire little-league baseball team. 

With all this to consider, how could a single two hour film even begin to adapt Kiryu's adventures? The short answer is: surprisingly well: loosely adapting the first game in the series - also the focus for Amazon Prime's middling (and easily confused with) adaption, Like a Dragon: Yakuza (2024) - it distils the game down to events over a single hot night in Kamurochō (patterned after Tokyo district, Kabukichō), kickstarted by a duo of bankrobbers finding the safe supposedly containing 10 billion yen is empty, just as Kiryu is released from prison, soon picking up an unlikely ally in the form of his adoptive daughter, Haruka (Natsuo), who is searching for her mother. With rival gangs hunting for him, and with violence spilling onto the streets of Kamurochō as we also follow a duo of petty teenage thieves (Shun Shioya & Saeko Dokyu), a Korean assassin, and the police trying to diffuse the hostage situation at the aforementioned bank, whilst Kiryu's former childhood friend, Nishikiyama (Claude Maki) lies in wait. 

In theory, this ensemble cast, this boiling down of sixty plus hours of gameplay into a single chaotic Tokyo evening should be a mess: Masashi Sogo's script certainly does have to dispense with many of the details of the plot, into a forward heft to find Haruka's mother, and get revenge on Nishikiyama. Purely as an adaption of Yakuza the game, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is, as many critics of the gaming press indicated at the time, a bit of a mess. Fortunately, Takashi Miike is more interested in Yakuza as a film, rather than as an adaption, and this is for the better. Shorn of its narrative complexities, Yakuza: Like a Dragon becomes the platonic ideal of a yakuza movie, if not its shining example; a brutally simple tale of an unstoppable force, in the form of Kitamura's stoic and plain-speaking Kiryu in search of an immovable object, or some form of redemption along the way. All of this grants the film a kinetic energy; the fights, and there are many, at once bruising and outlandish affairs in which bodies fly about, vast hordes of underlings are gunned, beaten, and baseball-batted down, as a storm of violence rages over Tokyo. 

Face to Face: Kiryu and Goro Majima (Gorô Kishitani)'s double act gives the film its chaotic energy and spirit

At the centre of this is the film's secret weapon, the wild form of Gorô Kishitani's Goro Majima, who steals every scene he appears in, often bordering on the supernatural in terms of how indestructible he seems to be. Kishitani is worth the admission alone, a psychotic foil to the measured and genteel Kiryu, as much a danger to his own underlings as he is to his enemies from his introduction at a batting cage onward. Every moment he's not on screen, snakeskin jacket, eyepatch, bat and all, is a moment wasted, and it is his unpredictability, his chaos, that keeps the film's latter half from becoming too predictable, often bursting into a scene without warning. The games thrive on this double-act, and it is the centre around which Miike's version of Yakuza is crafted, their fights escalating affairs that leave both bloodied and bruised and yet, still standing for another, and another, bout. 

There is something admirable about Yakuza: Like a Dragon. It may be little more than escalating action punctuated as much by an offbeat sense of comedy -much of the would-be bank robbers' subplot, and thus that of the police staked out next door is concerned with dealing with the aged air-con breaking down and attempting to negotiate dinner for themselves and their hostages - as increasingly outlandish feats of violence and action, but by hell does it escalate in the way the best videogames do, from mere scuffles to a fight between former friends for the fate of our hero's reputation and more besides. 

Unlike the other films we've considered this season, and thus for the better, Takashi Miike's adaption of the beloved action gangster franchise at once feels faithful to the game it is adapting, oddness, drama and all, and capable of standing on its own as a piece of cinema, a breakneck battle across Tokyo and through its criminal underbelly in search of redemption and honour.

Rating: Recommended

Yakuza: Like a Dragon is available to buy on DVD from CJ Entertainment. It is not avaible for streaming in the UK. 

Next week, and next month, we tune up and consider movies about musicians, beginning with the Coen Brothers' depiction of 60s NYC and Greenwich Village in Inside Llewyn Davis