Another Decade with Takashi Miike is a series of essays on the 2010s films of the Japanese maverick, following Notebook's earlier survey of Miike's first decade of the 21st century.
Being in league with Takashi Miike, taking the sensually arrayed and flayed curtains of flesh in stride, has a way of making one think of Claude Rains in Lawrence of Arabia: “It is recognized that you have a funny sense of fun.” When you make it your life’s work to decorate the insides of cinemas with the exploits of desperate, subhuman Yakuza, your idea of the business of law enforcement and especially your idea of heroism are bound to be just as warped as your sense of "fun". Miike’s cop movies are few and far between—he doesn’t get cops and he doesn’t much like them. There’s something about lying to people about the darkness inside you in order to maintain the moral high ground he finds distasteful. He objects to the idea that there are people who are better as a rule than the Yakuza he so loves and treasures.
Shield of Straw was one of his higher profile films, premiering in a coveted Cannes slot and almost scaring up a U.S. remake that’s still on the table, but the reviews were guarded. This didn’t seem like Miike, except for a few outlandish brush strokes. The thing is, when you get to know him, you know some subjects come with different demands and a cop movie is no place for fun. Shield of Straw is, tonally, thematically, and thanks to the presence of legendary character actor Masatô Ibu, one of the most prolific in Japan, a sequel to Negotiator, a TV movie the director made exactly a decade prior. Peculiarly, there was an actual big-budget remake of Negotiator in 2010, itself a continuation of a TV series, both directed by Hidetomo Matsuda, and Ibu was one of the only returning cast members for that, too. Negotiator was a minor-key Miike; murky photography and a sense of guilt runs among the characters. It feels like they should be better people, seeing as they’re the thing that stands between life and death for so many. Shield of Straw takes that idea and magnifies it by about 150%. The fluids don’t spill as freely, but the lesson hurts worse.
Miike was coming off of Lesson of the Evil, and Shield of Straw feels like the work of a renewed formalist and theorist. The colors and compositions are intense and near-mathematically precise. The city looks stark and menacing in its impenetrable angles; it’s teeming with life, and every one of those lives could turn against our heroes at any minute. Miike makes time and space an enemy as much as the horde of desperate men who complicate the plot. There’s also a sense, left over from Lesson of the Evil, that if you’re going to show violence in film, especially in a high-concept blockbuster of the Lethal Weapon or The Killer school of spectacle, it had better mean something. It does. Shield of Straw’s got a story to die for: child-murderer Kunihide Kiyomaru (Tatsuya Fujiwara, the young hero from Battle Royale) has been on a killing spree across urban Japan but he cuts it short after he kills the wrong young girl. His last victim was the granddaughter of a wealthy celebrity named Ninagawa (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who offers up a billion-yen bounty on Kiyomaru’s head. Kiyomaru knows he can’t beat the odds so he turns himself to the security police, who have to take him to Tokyo so he can stand trial before one of the newly motivated millions of people, including cops, can kill him. Five people stand between all of Tokyo and one lowlife murderer.
Miike plays a cunning game with genre up front, opening with a bang and then slowly making the violence more ugly, personal, and cruel. The five detectives each have their own lessons to learn during the course of the 24 hours they spend chained to Kiyomaru. Hot-headed Kanbashi (Kento Nagayama) seems like the cool rogue of the bunch, cannily handling the big blockbuster set-piece that sees him shooting the driver of a truck full of nitroglycerine driven by a man on a suicide machine. He even walks away from the explosion, cool as can be, like the star of a Joel Silver production. It’s his certainty that proves his undoing, shot by a mob of train passengers who overtake them. The scene is unyielding. He seems completely undone by the idea that he’ll die because he protected the worst criminal in the nation. Ibu’s elder detective, Sekiya, comes aboard because he imagines he’s seen everything and can be an unflappable and unconnected aid to the team. He’ll drop out when he has to shoot a man so desperate for the reward money that he would stab a kid in front of her mother. He just isn’t prepared to see what people would stoop to for a cash prize. What is the society he’s protecting if money would bring this out of people? Atsuko Shiraiwa (Nanako Matsushima) looks like she’s going to be our moral fulcrum, as she’s the mother of a small child herself, but it isn’t long before she’s offering to shoot the hostage and call it a day. Okumura (Miike regular Gorô Kishitani) looks like he’s in it for the long haul when he loses his partner, but he’s got a secret that comes out at the worst time. That leaves Mekari (Takao Ozawa), who is positioned as the hero in the first minutes but stays away from the action when it starts getting heated.
Mekari’s blankness is charged like a defibrillator by Miike as the noose tightens around his squad. As death encircles them and he can trust less and less of his surroundings and his team, he starts to break down. Mekari gets the film’s final word, having watched the trappings of his job and its implicit belief system crumble to just him and a murderer alone on a deserted road, nothing between them but a loaded gun. Mekari can finally confess that he’s wanted to end Kiyomaru’s life the whole time and he isn’t even sure what’s keeping him from doing it. There’s a cut from Mekari screaming from the depths of his soul, the gun jammed into his charge’s forehead like he was tattooing the barrel onto his face, and then the jarring silence. Mekari’s backstory is drawn out gradually, like everyone else’s. His pregnant wife died in a car accident and he’ll never have justice. Mekari will learn that everyone who tried to kill him had their reasons—debt, vengeance, redemption. There’s something inside this man that won’t let him admit he’s nothing but a tool for another man’s hollow vengeance, let alone become that thing. The closest thing to godliness in Miike’s filmography comes when Mekari repeatedly puts himself in front of Kiyamaru to stop him or someone else from being killed. “Listen to the whispers of the dead,” he cautions one in a long line of bereaved tormentors. “The dead don’t speak,” is the icy reply, before a knife is drawn on him. This is a long way from Ace Attorney.
Miike makes sure that the deaths are all hard, relentless things, whether it’s Mekari’s wailing, piteous realization he couldn’t save one of his team from Mekari’s bloodlust or Sekiya looking broken after he kills the deranged assassin with the hostage. Miike executes the sequence breathtakingly. In one angle, the man with the knife screams and moves in a discomfiting way, in the next he cuts back to Sekiya who fires and then stares for what feels like ten seconds, horror written on his openmouthed expression. Then he cuts back to the little hostage standing by herself and it takes us a minute to realize she’s alone in the frame and unharmed. Another long second and her mother appears in frame to help her. Sekiya looks away finally and sees the face of Kiyomaru smiling through the train window, which he closes as if it’s a curtain on a performance. He’s given his judgment and it sickens Sekiya. The next shot finds him walking, crestfallen, surrounded by the SWAT team, away from the action and out of the film.
Being heroic tastes bitter and he wants no more of it. Dying victims are framed upside down, staring directly at the camera. Close-ups of bloody hands gripping each other in the moment of death abound. The score will be literally interrupted by a radio broadcast announcing an off-screen character’s suicide, as if it were playing on the radio. What are you here for? Fun?