Spoiler alert: "waru" means "bad" in Japanese.
This film is abysmal, but as a Miike fan, I'll do my best to explain how I arrived at that conclusion. Bear in mind that this is the same man who made "13 Assassins", "Ichimei", "Ichi the Killer", "Sukiyaki Western Django", and "Crows Zero", films I think are epic, so try to understand that it saddens me to watch "Waru", maybe the worst film I've ever seen.
Before I get into that, I'd like to explain how I generally regard Miike. If you've made even the most superficial attempt to study Miike's work, you recognize that he's enamored of "B-Movie" tropes and "grindhouse" elements in film. The awkward blood, gore, torture, and grotesque sex scenes delivered in bizarre edits are commonly associated with the low-budget nature of grindhouse. When Miike seems suddenly or deliberately "bad" at certain points, the purpose is to portray that "feel". Miike's a film nerd; a cinema "otaku", so these are film nerd jokes he's making. You have to bring that awareness with you when you watch his films or you'll misunderstand the punch lines he's throwing at the audience.
In terms of style, he's a kind of Japanese cousin to Quentin Tarantino, maybe a little more weighted toward the horrific, with a bit of John Waters thrown in for shock value. Just like Tarantino, Miike also has a preoccupation with the Japanese equivalent of "Americana": artifacts and elements related to the history, geography, folklore and cultural heritage of (especially 20th century) Japan. This leads him to draw extensively from pop-culture sources like manga, yakuza mythos, and old samurai films (all three elements are featured in 'Waru'). Miike is often referred to as subversive because there is something distinctly "punk rock" about his iconoclasm and non-conformity; that is, if you're willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. For example, it's reasonable to see "Crows Zero" as a kind of "punk" treatment of the Japanese literary trope of the 'samurai epic' (e.g., 'Tale of the Heikei'), with it's endless factions and sub-plots between multiple protagonists (a theme repeated in Sukiyaki Western Django). My point is, Miike demonstrates that he's aware of high-brow culture even when he's making something absurd or grotesque.
That being said, even if I assume he makes "bad film" on purpose as a meta-commentary or something, even by that standard, this is truly the worst film by Takashi Miike I've ever seen. While I agree with the specific criticisms made by another reviewer (xXBoss-EbertXx), I find his statement "Then again, can anyone expect anything good from Miike's factory?" disqualifies him as biased against all the director's films. Still, in the case of "Waru", it's even hard for a fan of Miike to tell what Miike was thinking. The whole thing is "bad"; ironically, "waru" means "bad" in Japanese.
Waru is a steady stream of abject absurdity, but it doesn't look deliberately absurd, and that's a problem. The viewer is beaten in the eyes with every trope associated with bad 80's action film, from beginning to end: the bad-ass martial arts outcast from society, underworld assassins hiding under every hedge, physics defying prop-battles (like the jet-ski hand-gun joust), physics defying gangster pompadours (helmet hair), endless streams of stupid thugs for the (anti)hero to beat in the face with a wooden bokken (kendo practice sword), because he's apparently a modern-day samurai who fights gunmen with a wooden sword like Miyamoto Musashi dueling Seijuro. I even got the "Musashi" allusion, like this guy is the "yakuza version of Musashi", but it still didn't feel like it was making fun of the subject matter or the genre. Miike seemed eerily serious; if he wasn't, I really couldn't tell.
Even when compared to his other manga-to-film projects, the characters, plot, and action are just boring. Even the "mood" was flat. Nothing shocking, nothing particularly gratuitous, no subversive message to be deciphered. In the end, I was just like "wtf?" Because I love Miike so much, I've gone to the trouble of getting a copy of the manga by Kagemaru Jyoya that 'Waru' was derived from. I'm reading it to see if I missed something key to understanding this film, just in case.
Conclusion: "Waru" lived up to it's name. It was just "bad".
This film is abysmal, but as a Miike fan, I'll do my best to explain how I arrived at that conclusion. Bear in mind that this is the same man who made "13 Assassins", "Ichimei", "Ichi the Killer", "Sukiyaki Western Django", and "Crows Zero", films I think are epic, so try to understand that it saddens me to watch "Waru", maybe the worst film I've ever seen.
Before I get into that, I'd like to explain how I generally regard Miike. If you've made even the most superficial attempt to study Miike's work, you recognize that he's enamored of "B-Movie" tropes and "grindhouse" elements in film. The awkward blood, gore, torture, and grotesque sex scenes delivered in bizarre edits are commonly associated with the low-budget nature of grindhouse. When Miike seems suddenly or deliberately "bad" at certain points, the purpose is to portray that "feel". Miike's a film nerd; a cinema "otaku", so these are film nerd jokes he's making. You have to bring that awareness with you when you watch his films or you'll misunderstand the punch lines he's throwing at the audience.
In terms of style, he's a kind of Japanese cousin to Quentin Tarantino, maybe a little more weighted toward the horrific, with a bit of John Waters thrown in for shock value. Just like Tarantino, Miike also has a preoccupation with the Japanese equivalent of "Americana": artifacts and elements related to the history, geography, folklore and cultural heritage of (especially 20th century) Japan. This leads him to draw extensively from pop-culture sources like manga, yakuza mythos, and old samurai films (all three elements are featured in 'Waru'). Miike is often referred to as subversive because there is something distinctly "punk rock" about his iconoclasm and non-conformity; that is, if you're willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. For example, it's reasonable to see "Crows Zero" as a kind of "punk" treatment of the Japanese literary trope of the 'samurai epic' (e.g., 'Tale of the Heikei'), with it's endless factions and sub-plots between multiple protagonists (a theme repeated in Sukiyaki Western Django). My point is, Miike demonstrates that he's aware of high-brow culture even when he's making something absurd or grotesque.
That being said, even if I assume he makes "bad film" on purpose as a meta-commentary or something, even by that standard, this is truly the worst film by Takashi Miike I've ever seen. While I agree with the specific criticisms made by another reviewer (xXBoss-EbertXx), I find his statement "Then again, can anyone expect anything good from Miike's factory?" disqualifies him as biased against all the director's films. Still, in the case of "Waru", it's even hard for a fan of Miike to tell what Miike was thinking. The whole thing is "bad"; ironically, "waru" means "bad" in Japanese.
Waru is a steady stream of abject absurdity, but it doesn't look deliberately absurd, and that's a problem. The viewer is beaten in the eyes with every trope associated with bad 80's action film, from beginning to end: the bad-ass martial arts outcast from society, underworld assassins hiding under every hedge, physics defying prop-battles (like the jet-ski hand-gun joust), physics defying gangster pompadours (helmet hair), endless streams of stupid thugs for the (anti)hero to beat in the face with a wooden bokken (kendo practice sword), because he's apparently a modern-day samurai who fights gunmen with a wooden sword like Miyamoto Musashi dueling Seijuro. I even got the "Musashi" allusion, like this guy is the "yakuza version of Musashi", but it still didn't feel like it was making fun of the subject matter or the genre. Miike seemed eerily serious; if he wasn't, I really couldn't tell.
Even when compared to his other manga-to-film projects, the characters, plot, and action are just boring. Even the "mood" was flat. Nothing shocking, nothing particularly gratuitous, no subversive message to be deciphered. In the end, I was just like "wtf?" Because I love Miike so much, I've gone to the trouble of getting a copy of the manga by Kagemaru Jyoya that 'Waru' was derived from. I'm reading it to see if I missed something key to understanding this film, just in case.
Conclusion: "Waru" lived up to it's name. It was just "bad".
