Avis des critiques

If you’re consistently amused by ludicrous color-coding (the look’s almost as artificial as Speed Racer, complete with an opening sequence straight out of Kwaidan, set against a glaringly artificial painted red sun), or if the sound of a movie where the climax is basically random mayhem punctuated by a dude firing a Gatling gun with the crazed laughter of a kamikaze pilot sounds appealing to you, you’ll get exactly what you want in consistent doses.

Once you get past the question of why someone would make a movie this artificial in the first place and move on to the answer (purely for the hell of it), "Sukiyaki Western Django" is a blood-drenched, dynamite, often hilarious and uniquely weird big-screen entertainment.

For a while the weird color scheme and the tongue-in-cheek evocation of various traditions of popular cinema are amusing. But long before the final blood bath arrives the movie has made its point, which is essentially that Mr. Miike has a lot of energy and an extensive collection of DVDs.

If you’re full of brittle irony, wanting nothing more than to laugh at the bizarre English dialogue and roll your eyes at his directorial excesses, then it’s mere camp. But if it strikes you as inexplicably right, then it means you’ve tuned into Miike’s freaky wavelength and for you, Sukiyaki Western Django will be one of the smartest and most satisfying movies of the summer.

Of Miike’s recent films, “Sukiyaki” perhaps most resembles “Izo,” with its bizarre mixture of plasticity and ultraviolence, but the new film is more a playful pastiche than a dark jaunt down a samurai rabbit-hole. Although it’s slightly less bloody and more coherent than its predecessor, “Sukiyaki” is also much less exciting.

Miike too often seems to be not so much reinventing the spaghetti western as simply contributing a middling entry to the genre. And even when it’s going strong, Sukiyaki continually reminds us that it’s nothing more than an occasionally clever bit of dispensable pastiche.