If you’ve ever wanted to see a bald guy with a diamond grill sharpened into fangs relentlessly making cat puns and tearing up the screen with his Yakuza gang, have I got a movie for you.
Prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike’s latest film, Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji, is an aggressive assault on your eyeballs and funny bone. Based on the cult manga by Noboru Takahashi, the film is a bloody smorgasbord of violence, comedy, and genuinely clever plotting. Judging by the reaction to it at its Fantasia Fest screening, Mole Son is a riotous crowd-pleaser.
During the introductory sequence, the audience is thrown face first into a comical underworld of colorful characters. None of it makes much sense at first, but Miike deftly unfurls the plot, connecting bits of information and images previously seen. The story follows Reiji Kikukawa, an inept police officer with a lot of heart. He’s sent undercover to infiltrate Sukiya-kai, Japan’s most deadly Yakuza gang, to stop their drug dealing business from contaminating the whole country.
It’s a fairly standard undercover cop narrative, but once the initial plot is set in motion, what follows is anything but ordinary. Reiji’s naivety and brash attempts to get in deeper with the Sukiya-kai lead to some hilarious and overtly violent set pieces. Rather than metaphorically taking in the power of a ceremonial bowl during an initiation ceremony, Reiji literally eats the bowl. It’s this type of stuff that leads to some truly hysterical moments.
His “mediator” during his initiation trials is Hiura, known as “Crazy Papillon” due to his obsession with butterflies. Though Hiura is a savage member of the Yakuza who considers lack of violence “boring,” he’s also charismatic as hell. He considers humor the most important value in a Yakuza member, so he takes quickly to Reiji’s delirious enthusiasm towards joining the gang. They develop a brotherly relationship that leads to some emotionally honest and heartfelt moments amongst the delirium found in the rest of the film. It’s a chemistry that really works.
Mole Song goes through many of the beats found in other undercover cop films, but with an impossible amount of energy, humor, and violence. After Miike’s recent darker outings like Lesson of Evil and Shield of Straw, it’s nice to see the versatile filmmaker returning to lighter fare. And hot damn does he knock it outta the park. It’s downright impressive how many gags, fights, and inventive storytelling ideas Miike has managed to cohesively twine together here. There are some abrupt tonal shifts later in the film that felt jarring after so much mad fun, but Miike doesn’t keep a straight face for long.
The crowd at last night’s Fantasia Fest screening couldn’t keep one either in the face of this brilliantly bonkers film. Whenever Mole Song hits the States, do not miss it. Unless you hate fun and laughing.