Sogo Ishii has said that the images for his films seem to well up from somewhere deep inside him, without connection to anything earthly. That certainly explains Dead End Run, which seems to come from literally nowhere but ends up going nowhere as well. By “connections”, I don’t mean links to Ishii’s other movies — although there’s the visual kinetics of Electric Dragon 80.000 V and Gojoe, and some of the crazed song-and-dance of Burst City, etc. — but connections to anything other than whatever the director was thinking about filming one day. It’s an arbitrary collection of images and thematic ideas that have nothing in common other than the fact that they’re sharing running time (pun unintended) in the same film, and they’re never developed into anything other than cheesy little outtakes.
Run is not even a full-length movie, but three interlinked shorts that runs a total of just under one hour, including credits. Ishii himself is a fitfully brilliant filmmaker: Gojoe was the best samurai movie I’d seen from Japan in decades, and Dragon and Burst City are more than worth checking out. Many of the folks involved — Tadanobu Asano and Masatoshi Nagase, most notably — have been staple figures in Ishii’s recent productions, so there’s some level of pedigree to the production. But Run is like an anthology of vague ideas that Ishii didn’t want to let go of, and so he recycled them into this lumpen form. The only thing the three movies have in common is the image of someone running, or on the run, or being pursued, but it’s a lame way to link together the stories when they aren’t terribly interesting to begin with.
Last Song
The first segment, “Last Song”, gives us a bewildered Yusuke Iseya (the “hero” of Casshern) scampering across Tokyo and hiding out in an alley. By mistake he kills a young woman (Michikako Ichikawa), assuming her to be his stalker — only to have her rise from the dead, twitching like a marionette, and perform a song-and-dance routine thanking him for having released her from her life. It’s intended to be whimsical, I guess, but it just comes off as awkward, and it ends without developing into anything other than a bunch of tropes with no way to really bind them together.
Even less can be said about segment two, “Shadows”. Here we have Nagase (who is always great to watch) as a trenchcoated denizen of the night with a silver hand (shades of his half-human Electric Buddha from Dragon). He ends up in the same dead-end alley as Iseya from the first segment, and is cornered by … himself. Likewise, the man who’s come after him sees himself as his target. They get into a Mexican standoff, and glare at each other, and that’s about it, barring a whole lot of posturing and brooding sax and guitar music on the soundtrack. It’s so far below Ishii’s real level of talent that it borders on insulting.
Shadows
“Fly” is the best of the bunch, but that’s still not saying much. Tadanobu Asano, like his predecessors, flees from the cops through Tokyo’s alleys and up to a rooftop; there, he takes a woman hostage as a ploy to keep his adversaries at bay. The problem is, once Asano’s there, he — like Ishii — has no idea what to do next. Events unfold which lead us right back to the end of the other two segments, leaving us feeling not so much like we have come home but rather like we have completed the cinematic equivalent of a Chinese fire drill. Asano makes his moments bearable, and Urara Awata, who was the unwed peasant mother in Gojoe, again uses her haunted eyes to make the sequence work even when the script (and director) fail them utterly.
Chess masters use the term “sandbagging” to describe playing below your level of expertise for easy points. That’s an apt description for Run — it’s the sort of thing a first-year film student would have turned out on a credit card, and if that was what it had been it might have been impressive simply for the fact that it got made. But Ishii is not a novice and he ought to be able to do better in his sleep. Come to think of it, even novices have done better: Die Bad was shot by a first-time director on probably the same budget as this movie (I’m guessing far, far less), and while it ran longer it never felt like a single minute of it was wasted time.
Fly
Sure, Run looks and sounds great. The grainy colors blaze with digital post-processing, and some of the individual shots of the alleys at night are good enough to blow up and hang on a wall. But a movie is not a picturebook; Ishii’s love of blazing imagery finally gets the better of him in the embarrassingly bad CGI-fueled ending of the third segment. And once we realize that Ishii has nothing to give us except moody lighting and a shaky camera style, there’s really no reason to stick around. I’m reminded of the record critic who said he would gladly buy a whole album of nothing but Dylan breathing hard, but never an album of Dylan breathing softly. Here, Ishii is not even breathing softly; it’s more like he’s clearing his throat.
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