Review: Gozu

Takashi Miike's 1 millionth film this year is Gozu, a humorous story of a young Yakuza searching for his missing, and presumed dead, boss. His journey finds him in a town with breast milk bootleggers, yapping diner clientele, cow-headed apparations and reincarnated Yakuza bosses.

Miike's oeuvre gets increasingly diverse and confounding, but I fear it's also getting a bit tiresome as well. Gozu is entertaining and lively, but it lacks the focus of earlier Miike masterpieces like Audition, Ichi the Killer, The Bird People in China and Dead or Alive. Gozu doesn't go as delightfully wacky as The Happiness of the Katakuris and doesn't have the gravity of Graveyard of Honor.

Consequently, Gozu, though certainly not without merits (Miike is, as always, a master craftsman), stands as a mild diversion by a filmmaker who is capable of so much more.

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