It was genuinely hard for me to believe, when I first heard about Sukiyaki Western Django, that I was actually looking forward to a movie involving Quentin Tarantino.  I had been burned by this man and his sludgy, angsty, stuck-in-the-seventies style before, and to think that I might be so burned again was too much to bear.

But then I found out the truth–Quentin Tarantino had about as much to do with it as I did.  He only appears for a few minutes, as an expository character who really doesn’t do much of anything besides sit, swagger, and fill in some backstory.  And then I found out Takashi Miike was handling the direction on this one and my jaw just dropped.  See, Takashi Miike has given me a LOT of interesting things to talk about.  That crazy son of a bitch has been responsible for some of the most lunatic things I’ve ever seen–for instance, he gave me Audition.  The last half-hour of Audition puts anything it compares to into shock BEFORE beating it up and taking its lunch money.  He’s put out Imprint, the one Masters of Horror segment that even SHOWTIME wouldn’t show on television.  When Showtime looks at something and says, hey, whoa–that’s too much even for US…you know you’ve got a real pack of explosive something-or-other on your hands.

And Sukiyaki Western Django will not disappoint.

One part parody, one part homage–can we call it a farcical homage?–Sukiyaki Western Django takes us to a little Japanese village named Nevata unless I misread the signs.  Nevata is sitting on a treasure worth a whole lot of money, and two rival gangs, the Heiki and the Genji, are both vying for the loot.  The town, what’s left of it, thinks it has a savior in a random stranger that’s come for his cut, but both the Heiki and the Genji want this mysterious lone gunman working for them.  Meanwhile, the rest of the town is grappling with secrets of its own, and as everything boils to an explosive finish in the one single pot, we see how sukiyaki can give the Western a whole new life, and give birth to a Django.

Yeah, I know, it’s actually pretty weird when you think about it, but then so is a lot of Japanese cinema.  If you don’t believe me, sometime, go out and grab a copy of Crazy Lips, or get it from Netflix.  THEN you’ll believe me.  But I’m digressing.

What Miike has made here is standard for Miike in that what he’s produced is absolutely mind-blowing.  I often find myself wondering, whenever I find something else from him, if this guy is actually capable of making, say, Beethoven.  Or maybe Ghost Rider.  You know, a harmless piece of fluff that’s just kind of entertaining but scarcely worth a second look?  That’s not Miike.  In fact, that’s not Miike’s entire career from what I’ve been able to tell so far.  What his entire career seems to be–what Sukiyaki Western Django is–is a nonstop flood of mindblowing material that’s packed with plenty of things that don’t make any sense at all but look damn cool doing it.

What can you say about a movie that, while you’re watching it, you can look at several points and say, verbatim, “I don’t understand a BIT of what just happened there, but all I know is, that was AWESOME.”?  But I’ll say this much for it–as a Western, it’s a clear winner.  It combines several great classic elements such as surprise bulletproof vest, fun with Gatlings, unlikely bullet interceptions, and presents them in this whole new pot that we’ve never seen before.  Where before, some of the great Westerns were spaghetti Westerns, imported from Italy, we now have a Japanese western…indeed, a SUKIYAKI Western.  Maybe it’d be more approrpriate if it were the SOBA Western, or maybe even the Ramen Western to identify with the college kids and those who were not so long ago, Sukiyaki Western it seems to be, and Sukiyaki Western does just fine.