20131221: Action Review--Yakuza-Busting Girls: Final Death-Ride Battle

Yakuza-Busting Girls: Final Death Ride Battle

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. Japanese live action feature length film, 2010, NR, 96 minutes, action, crime.
2. IMDB: 5.3/10.0 from 63 audience ratings.  Spoken word is in Japanese; subtitles in English.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No reviews yet...' and 13% liked it from 20 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 2.4/5.0 from 1,839 audience ratings.
5. Written and directed by: Kazushi Nakadaira.
6. Starring: Asami, Rena Komine, Sakichi Sato, Misato Tate, Rumi Hiragi.


2. Setup and Plot
1. The film opens to Asami breaking out of her small mound grave.  Perhaps they buried her alive.  She gets out and shakes off the dirt.  She's wearing a pair of black panties and a somewhat healed bullet hole over her heart.  She finds a character killed in the previous phone.  He's obviously alive, so she takes the wooden cross from her grave, sharpened at the lower end, and rams it through his heart.  Nice.  Then a group of characters killed in the last film show up and advance on Asami with menace, and guns, and swords.


2. Asami keeps killing Yakuza and collecting pinkie fingers.  She makes the news.  Apparently she can kill any reasonable number of men, but when a woman smaller than she is attacks, Asami wins the contest, but is hurt badly.  She meanders around in great pain until Yayoi, the daughter of a local doctor, finds her and brings her to safety.


3. Asami sleeps a lot while recovering.  This allows flashbacks to when Asami was in different gang alliances when she was younger.  This culminated in her getting shot followed by a vision of her burial site.  Asami has waking visions as well, which makes for awkward encounters.


4. In the present, the gang elements put pressure on the head of household through his daughter who was seen with Asami.  The Yakuza torture Asami and Yayoi after capturing them.  The scourging with long stemmed (thorned) roses was somewhat well done.  But then there are numerous continuity errors afterward. 


5. The final large battle was sort of fun, but was ruined by that fact that each individual fight was absurd.


3. Conclusions
1. Are there no police in Japan?  Does slavish obedience to PC nonsense rule Japanese film making?
2. One line summary: Bad acting and screenplay overwhelm mediocre camera work in this poor sequel.
3. One star of five.  Two black holes for acting and screenplay.  The finger-cutting stand-down game (played twice) was the stupidest thing I have seen in years.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 4/10 Horrible camera work when the girl gangs are out intimidating men and stealing their money.  Visuals are dark throughout.


2. Sound: 6/10 The subtitles seemed to be OK.  The incidental music was way too intrusive.


3. Acting: 0/10 The fight choreography was bad to terrible.  The acting was absurd throughout.  I did not believe the performance of a single character.


4. Screenplay: 0/10 The long sequences about girl gang members committing crimes was neither entertaining nor informative.  The habit of spending a couple of moments in the present, then going for a long dive into meaningless nonsense (karaoke, or robbing people on the street) in the past is boring and irritating.  When is the main thread going forward?  The main story could have been done at a leisurely pace in twenty minutes, not ninety-six.