Tokyo Tribe

Sion Sono is a weird guy. That’s a statement I’ve used to start two previous reviews, and it’s one I’m sure I’ll use again. The Japanese director makes astoundingly bizarre movies, covering massive ranges of genres (usually in the same film),

Tokyo Tribe continues the weirdness streak. It’s a rap musical or ‘hip h-Opera’ if you’d prefer, and it’s as strange as it sounds. It’s mostly freestyling with beatboxing as back-up, with characters rapping their lines. There aren’t really any standalone ‘songs’ oddly enough. Sometimes an entire scene will be done in rap, and other times it might only be a few lines. The most you get from the background music is a simple beat. And yet it all weirdly works for the movie.

The movie is loosely structured, with an entire hour of its running time feeling more like set up and exposition, until the second half where things actually happen. The story itself is basic, and the characters are all two dimensional, but the film still sort of works. It is all style over substance but is entertaining. It just isn’t particularly deep or meaningful.

 

In near-future Tokyo, constant earthquakes have reduced the city into a gangland warzone with various street gangs, known as tribes, controlling the different districts and battling each other. The biggest and most violent tribe is the Bukuro Wu-ronz, led by the violent Meera. Meera is the son of psychopathic gangster Beppa, a powerful crime lord with eyes for taking over all of Tokyo. With Beppa’s support, Meera begins a war to take over the streets and eliminate all the tribes.

The Musashiro Saru tribe is peaceful, promoting love and understanding – they welcome anybody and have no interest in starting fights. Meera targets them to start his war, forcing peace-loving Kai to take charge and rally the other tribes together to bring Meera and Beppa down. Caught in the middle of this is runaway action girl Sunmita, who is being hunted by tough foreign fighters working for Satanist priests, and a young street boy determined to protect her.

The film takes a full hour before the plot actually gets rolling, and by the time it does you realise you don’t know anything about the main hero Kai (or that you haven’t actually seen/noticed him for an hour). Most of the movie is set up and preparation, flitting from the various characters rapping. We get more attention given to random evil characters (the foreign fighters, while cool, actually have no impact on any of the story at all). The movie is style over substance, but it’s still disappointing to know nothing about the characters you’re supposed to be rooting for.

Everything about Beppa and his family is absolutely insane and weird, on a completely different level to everything else. Beppa is played with psychotic relish by Riki Takeuchi, who has played Yakuza bosses in a bunch of Takashi Miike films, but nothing quite to vulgar and ridiculous as here. He’s like a horny, sadistic Elvis. There are two women, presumably his daughters (it’s really unclear). One is a hyperactive beatboxing girl who, for the finale, shows up in the iconic yellow Bruce Lee jumpsuit. The other has massive breasts. That’s honestly it for her; she sits around sipping from champagne glasses with ample cleavage on show. Meera’s weirdo brother has a room full of human furniture – nude people painted white who have to stand and sit in position as lamps, tables and chairs. The family is really bizarre, but sadly most are killed off in sudden, anticlimactic fashion.

The film does get a bit uncomfortable at times, usually in the treatment of women. At the beginning, before the main title has come up, the various gangs are introduced while Meera molests a topless police officer and runs a knife across her naked body. Sunmita also has a scene where she’s beaten, stripped and molested by Meera. By the end she’s running around kicking ass, but that scene (taking place in a makeshift brothel) can be uncomfortable. In fact the entirety of Beppa’s operations seems to involve abducting girls off the street and then either turning them into prostitutes or eating them

 

Sion Sono’s films all tend to have a fairly makeshift feel to them – there’s often something makeshift or low budget about the set designs and lighting (one suspects it’s all digital cameras), but he makes it work for his films. That’s especially true here, where the streets of Tokyo are brought to life in big style. The alleys and streets are full of bright neon lights, vibrant graffiti and assorted junk, with a real life to them. They look good and it really sells the whole ‘tokyo tribe’ setting that film wants to set up. The film does compromise this once, in a single shot that seems to have been shot in the middle of a busy, bustling Japanese city, but otherwise the look of the film is great. The various tribes’ hangouts all feel fitting, from disco clubs and nightclubs to abandoned shopping malls. Musashiro Saru hang out in a diner, while Beppa’s family lives in an absurdly luxurious mansion.

The biggest deciding factor in how you’ll like the film is in whether the rap musical gimmick works for you or not. The music isn’t particularly catchy, nor are the lyrics insightful, but it still works, even when some of the performers are lacking (one or two rap in monotone, in particular a narrator characters). The other issue is the odd pace – as I’ve said, the first hour is all build up and introductions, to the point where it feels like the payoff will never come. When it does it’s entertaining, though is does seem to abruptly jump past certain parts. One tribe has a tank that just goes missing, a cool fight in a booby trapped bamboo maze is over too quickly and some big encounters fizzle out completely.

Tokyo Tribe is a weird, entertaining movie, much like many of Sion Sono’s films. It is style over substance, but that style works, even though the movie takes a long time to get rolling. I enjoyed it, though I had more fun with Sono’s other recent movie, ‘Why Don’t You Play in Hell?’