--While the spoilers in this review concern the plot, they will not ruin the movie for those who haven't seen it yet. It is written with such people in mind.--<br /><br />I am a big fan of prolific Japanese director, Miike Takashi. His movies are not always good (which would be an accomplishment, considering he averages about three feature length films a year), but he doesn't mind experimenting or playing around. Not everything he tries works, but when it does, it can be pretty damn awesome.<br /><br />His subjects and genres vary wildly from a musical about a family running an inn, to a kid fighting goblins, to some of the best yakuza flicks I've seen. Meanwhile, he tends to get good performances from his actors, even when they are children or non-native Japanese speakers. The only time I've been completely disappointed with one of his pieces was a rejected instalment in Showtime's "Masters of Horror", entitled 'Imprint'. The story was stupid, and the acting was bad. This was Miike's first all English production, and it showed.<br /><br />So, when I found out one of his 2007 films, "Sukiyaki Western Django", was in English, I was a bit put off. How did I find out? Well, I started watching it, and that was the only language track. You could tell the actors hadn't been dubbed over, either from the way much of the all Japanese (except for Quintin Tarantino) cast struggled with their deliveries. As such, the film is an excellent example of Bertolt Brecht's 'theatrical alienation', constantly forcing us to deal with the movie as a movie, but this is not something we are entirely comfortable doing.<br /><br />It took me about 45 minutes to get over the choice of language. So, for artistry, the original dub accomplishes what it sets out to, but, man, it would be nice to see it overdubbed by native speakers in several languages. This is probably the only time you'll ever see me say that about anything that isn't a comedy which I want revoiced by Mexican actors. Mexican voice actors make everything funnier.<br /><br />Diction aside, it was pretty good for an adaptation/prequel of the second Italian, western adaptation of Kurosawa's wonderful tip of the hat to the genre, "Yojimbo" (which, itself, was an adaptation of a noire novel). That's right, "Sukiyaki Western Django" is both an adaptation and a prequel to the Spaghetti western, "Django", which came out two years after Sergio Leone's "A Fistfull of Dollars", both of which were adaptations of "Yojimbo", which was a samurai nod to westerns, but based on Dashiell Hammett's noir novel, "Red Harvest". Follow? SWD is less derivative than you might expect.<br /><br />Sure, "Red Harvest", "Yojimbo", "Fistful of Dollars", "Django", and "Sukiyaki Western Django", all centre around a martially talented drifter who finds himself in a town with two warring factions and a demoralized civilian populace. All their lead characters attempt to play the two sides against each other and are eventually dragged into fighting both, ostensibly for the good of whatever's left of the town by the end. But SWD fashions its own world, unlike the rest.<br /><br />It is apparently set in something like the mid to late 1800s, after the Shogunate has begun to lose power, but before the Meiji emperor's government has gained dominance; a time in which Japan appears to be in decline, and has been humiliated by foreigners. It's hard to pin down, though, because the film doesn't really concern itself with such matters. The competing groups are the remnants of the Genji and Heike clans, whose twelfth century conflicts were famously recorded in the performative epic poem, "Heike Monogatari". One of the gangs' leaders finds inspiration in Shakespeare's "Richard III".<br /><br />The two factions face off in a town whose very architecture conveys the strange lineage of this film, looking for its fabled treasure and fighting each other with guns, swords, dynamite, and whatever happens to be handy. Their garb fits with the architecture, and exhibits occidental, Japanese, feudal, and semi-modern influences. Their dialogue is peppered with hackneyed western clichés, delivered in by actors who mostly no have idea what they're saying.<br /><br />In the few reviews I read, I saw some glancing comparisons to the arch, technicolored western tribute, "Tears of the Black Tiger". They're both recent Asian films offering tribute and parody of the same (outwardly) American genre, so that's understandable, but I think SWD is better compared and contrasted with "The Quick and the Dead". They have a more similar purpose, but where Sam Raimi failed (despite a stellar cast) to find a decent treatment for westerns along the lines of his horror and superhero flicks, Miike has mostly succeeded by introducing a bizarre cultural mix and his own cult cinema sensibilities.<br /><br />Anyone who likes weird should check it out.