Best Served Old
Journeyman director Tsutomu Hanabusa turns the cool delinquent genre on its ear in ‘Tokyo Revengers’.
Tokyo Revengers
Director: Tsutomu Hanabusa • Writer: Izumi Takahashi, based on the manga by Ken Wakui
Starring: Takumi Kitamura, Mio Imada, Yuki Yamada, Ryo Yoshizawa, Shotaro Mamiya, Yosuke Sugino
Japan • 2hrs
Opens Hong Kong July 27 • IIB
Grade: B+
How anyone survives the barrage of blows to the head the characters in Tokyo Revengers | 東京卍リベンジャーズ do is beyond me. The manga adaptation with the year’s highest Brutal Beatings Per Minute ratio mixes more genres than probably exist, and as ridiculous as everyone’s hairstyle is – and they are ridiculous, almost as silly as the Moebius gang uniforms – the bloody action, low key comedy and time-travel knot makes this a more entertaining – and genuinely thoughtful – two hours than nearly every insipid romance to come from Japan in the last five years.
Tokyo Revengers is roughly two years old now, but the release here comes ahead of Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween – Destiny and Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween – Decisive Battle, scheduled for this September and… sometime soon; it’s 36 degrees out practically every day, so what better time to catch up? Based on Ken Wakui’s manga (and following a television series), that the dumbest part of Tsutomu Hanabusa’s (Sadako 3D) film is the idea that a goldfish lives 10 years is a credit to the the director’s sense of pacing, the eminently watchable cast and the thoroughly engaging Back to the Future-inflected story. The nonsense is played straight, and so we fall in line with barely a “WTF?”
Um… high school gangsters?
This quasi-Yakuza thriller, time travel, coming-of-age action-romance (see, all the genres) veers off course from standard bloody action in that Hanabusa and writer Izumi Takahashi take a stab at exploring themes of fate, acceptance, regret, self-actualisation, masculinity and our urge for “do-overs”. I know, right? Tokyo Revengers has a couple of laugh out loud moments, but it’s also far more dramatic than expected as we follow Takemichi Hanagaki (Takumi Kitamura) during his attempts to reset the timeline, if I may speak some Star Trek, and ensure himself the life he thinks he should have.
Powering Revengers’ momentum is the “If I knew then what I know now” nugget at the heart of the story. Takemichi comes to rely on this wisdom as he deals with his past mistakes, missteps and traumas, and allows himself to move forward. In the present day, mid-twenties Takemichi is a loser working in a bookstore, always apologising for his existence and fully immersed in the idea his best years are behind him, the ones from high school. When he hears his first love Hinata Tachibana (Mio Imada) and her brother Naoto (Yosuke Sugino) were killed by the notorious Tokyo Manji Gang – Toman – he wanders in an existential daze and winds up in front of an oncoming subway train. The collision throws him back in time – naturally – to his high school days when he was a cool juvie thug. This is ground zero for his troubles. He finds Naoto and makes him vow to watch out for a truck crash on July 1 ten years from then, they shake on it, and he gets zapped back to the present. In “real time” Hinata is still dead, Naoto is a detective bent on busting up Toman, and because he’s figured out Takemichi’s time travel thing, he decides best way to end the gang is to stop it before it forms. The paradoxes pile up when Takemichi gets a peek behind the curtain at the dynamic between budding Toman leader Manjiro Sano or Mikey (Ryo Yoshizawa, fabulous) and his right hand Kenchin Ryuguji, or Draken (Yuki Yamada, way, way way more engaging than he was in Whisper of the Heart), and learns Toman once had loftier ideals that went off the rails somewhere.
There’s lot of howling in that Japanese gangster movie way, but there’s also an undercurrent of actual emotion in the story. Takemichi can draw a straight line from his selfless concern for his friends and the humiliating beat-down by high school thug Masataka (Nobuyuki Suzuki, who’s, like, 40), who winds up exiled from Toman and with rival gang Moebius (who legit look like castoffs from The Warriors) to his quarterlife crisis. Most will take Kenchin and Manjiro’s gangland nuanced partnership at face value, but Yamada and Yoshizawa play them with just enough ambiguity to read a queer subtext between them, and it adds texture to an otherwise standard actioner. The revenge of the title is less about Hinata as it about Takemichi finally finding the stones to stand up for himself; to prove his worth to himself. This is way headier stuff than a juvenile delinquent melodrama should be. Tokyo Revengers ends on a curious note, and it’s easy to see where a sequel could go. Whether or not Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween – Destiny can keep up the intellectual pace is anyone’s guess. Here’s hoping it does. — DEK