Miike has slowly amassed international recognition for his shockingly extreme violence and absurd sexual perversions. Many of his films contain explicit and lurid bloodshed, often in an outlandish, ridiculous way. This particular action fantasy of his seems to have proved less accessible to anyone other than art-house audiences and fans of extreme cinema. I have yet to understand why. This bizarre massacre is full of symbolisms and simultaneously provokes both metaphysical complexities and suspension of disbelief. But so it goes with Miike.<br /><br />There is a vast world of difference between a self-indulgent affectation of symbolism zig- zagging intellectual pretension and a film by Takashi Miike in which he decides to offer some substance. There should not be some sort of barrier between the film and its audience. There is a remarkably unique atmosphere to this film, a dark, drug-like visual fusion of grunge and everything foreign to the viewer. We begin when the Shogunate is on its last legs, but still capable of punishing its enemies. The one we see is Izo, an assassin in the service of a warlord. After killing countless Shogun men, Izo is crucified and repeatedly speared. Instead of being passing on into an afterlife or ceasing to exist, his rage propels him through the space-time continuum, which races by through stock footage of World War II, to present-day Tokyo, where he finds himself on the streets and one with the city's destitute. Here Izo kills everyone in sight, no matter where time and space spontaneously and indefinitely throw him, his spirit still full of rage from his treatment in his past life, seemingly slicing and dicing timelessly till he can finally reach the karmic powers-that-be, one allegorical character played by the great minimalist actor-director Beat Takeshi, whose predecessors put him to death.<br /><br />Miike's depiction of the title character, or more exactly his phantom life force, exceeds reality, time and space as a surrealist rendering of Izo's extraordinarily and endlessly gory yet philosophical confrontations in a literal infinity drenched by symbolic imagery and characterizations, and accompanied by the fascinating, hilarious, disturbing acid-folk singer Kazuki Tomokawa on guitar.<br /><br />He is not stuffing these elements and images with profundity. He is actually telling the story as directly as one could. By symbolic imagery, I do not mean Bergmanesque questions of identity and metaphors that lie too deep for words or many other forms of reaction. I mean we actually at a couple of points see Izo running laps around a computer-generated infinity symbol. Different instances like the scene in which flowers gossip about and laugh at him, a woman pulling a sword from her vagina, Izo fully clad in samurai apparel and spattered with blood walking through an incidental modern office of cubicles. These are all very direct illustrations of surrealism, basic features of the element of surprise and startling juxtapositions.<br /><br />Really, in spite of this supernatural bloodbath's abstract implications, it is an explosion of rage and psychosis, endlessly violent, with a body count significantly higher than the Kill Bill films or even other gorefests by Miike himself. It is massive entertainment in the sense that a violent video game is, relieving your tensions by reflecting every ounce of aggression you may feel. My experience seeing it was refreshingly rich.