Director - Yasuomi Umetsu
Language – Japanese (English Subs)
Genre – Action / Horror. Blood & Guts. Broads & Guns.
The Internet hype and cult status of Yasuomi Umetsu's Kite (1998) is somewhat baffling. Sure, the eerie sex and super-violence rank among the fairly memorable in the anime history books, and if you can score points for all the ways to kill people with exploding bullets, I suppose it's a classic in that regard, but the problem with this sort of material is that it's best presented with a more gentle touch. Instead, Kite comes swinging a sledgehammer of provocative sensory overload that ultimately falls short do to one simple rule of film:
Somewhere in your bloodbath, you have to craft a reasons anyone might care about the outcome.
[Now, my exposure to the film is based on the Uncut version and if you're unfamiliar with the story of how Kite went through phases of being gradually less censored, wiki can do the 'splaining here. The toned down version is still available for those of you who still like exploding heads but don't care much for sex.]
The story follows a "college" student [for legal reasons] named Sawa, who was orphaned and subsequently adopted [yeah, you do the math there] by a murderous police detective with a sinister mustache and affinity for watching people die. The blank-stared Sawa, through some series of events no one bothered to let us in on, has become somewhat of a super-assassin who gets sent out by her boss / adopted dad / bang-buddy to clean up the streets, passing righteous exploding judgment on murderers and child molesters.
Now, before I plunge into all the things about Kite that made it a bad film, let me quickly touch on the thing that don't bother me...
The explicit sex has many viewers hot under the collar, with many clamoring that Kite isn't anything but glorified hardcore pornography. Which, is a bit of an over the top criticism in my estimation. The sex scenes themselves are far beyond what would be acceptable in an R rated movie that you might let your 16+ kids see, some involving visible penetration, however, we're not talking about Swank Magazine material or anything. And while the scenes are brief, they're numerous and their tone is intended to make the audience cringe as it's fully implied that while there's no struggle, these aren't the most willing encounters in the world. So, certainly keep your teenagers away, but as an adult who's not at all shy about the subject, their presence didn't hurt the film for me.
Or at least they wouldn't have if Kite had been better.
Maybe it's that I'm 25, or maybe I've spent too much time on the internet in the past 12 years, but this brand of blood, guts, and creepy sex just doesn't effect me when I have no emotional investment one way or the other about the characters. So while I still can't watch Akira without cringing when Tetsuo's would-be girlfriend is crushed (a much tamer scene, by comparison) I didn't find myself tensing up once during Kite. Instead the movie relies on it's blood-gushes and banging to cover for the fact that there's very little effort put into any other department.
To call the story is haphazardly assembled is probably an understatement. The crux of the entire plot is based on two encounters by Sawa and a young male assassin named Oburi who after, without reason or explanation, are suddenly in love, seemingly for no other reason than to keep things moving forward. It's as though the bulk of the action and sex were completely written and animated when the production staff said “well, we've got 15 minutes left. Why did all this shit just happen?”
The action sequences aren't particularly well choreographed and managed to use the same three tricks more than you'd ever think possible in a 50 minute film. Stylistically there's nothing that really pops or even makes you jump a little for the sheer cool-factor of it all. Something that even the most unapologetically “girls with big guns” anime has to some degree.
The payoff for all this lackluster development comes in what I assume is intended to be the film's most gritty scene wherein Oburi has to watch Sawa have sex as he lays beaten and blood on the floor, held down at gunpoint. A scene that in a better film would have been tough to stomach, but I couldn't help be completely overwhelmed by my indifference to what was going on.
Which leads me back to what I said about a gentle touch. Kite, at all points, seems out of the control of it's makers. There's no craft. There's no real reason for being other than to shock people who're easily shocked or pander to people who like limbs being blown off. Instead it's a particularly sigh-worthy mess that's not really constructed enough to be edgy or ridiculous enough to be laughably bad.
Posts
