Vicente Amorim’s Yakuza Princess is a genre mishmash that combines elements of the gangland melodrama, the samurai epic, the neo-noir thriller, and the spaghetti western to tell a story that spans two continents and features dialogue in three different languages. Filled with gun-toting yakuza and sword-wielding warriors, the film is both overstuffed and undernourished, a grimly self-serious tale of violent destiny that’s consistently drowned out by Amorim’s overreaching visual style.
Ping-ponging between Osaka and São Paulo, the film clumsily juggles three different storylines that converge in at once predictable and confusing ways. Singer-turned-actress Masumi stars as the orphaned Akemi, whose aimless existence in Brazil is upended when she discovers that she’s the scion of a powerful yakuza family. Meanwhile, Shiro (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) wakes up in a hospital with scars on his face, his memory wiped, and the police questioning him about an ancient katana. And Takeshi (Ihara Tsuyoshi) rounds out the central trio as a ruthless gang boss determined to eliminate his competition. These three chase after each other for much of the film while Akemi tries to uncover the secrets of her family’s past.
Such crime-movie roteness wouldn’t be such a problem with a sturdier hand at the wheel, one capable of shaping a narrative, building tension, and executing a memorable action sequence. Amorim focuses most of his attention on recreating the vivid, color-saturated look of Chad Stahelski and David Leitch’s John Wick. The film also cribs the infamous ear-cutting scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and the eerie fog-laden ambush sequence from Okamoto Kihachi’s The Sword of Doom, but Yakuza Princess lacks the precision and elegance of any of its reference points, as Amorim’s action sequences are mindless quick-cut flurries of clunky, indistinct hand-to-hand combat goosed up with ugly CGI blood splatter.
But these fight scenes, however graceless they may be, at least offer some relief from the monotonous plodding of the narrative. Full of directionless passages that seem to be leading to some grand revelation or rousing confrontation that never arrives, the screenplay has a way of setting up intriguing plot elements it never follows through on. Take, for example, the revelation that the katana in Shiro’s possession is infused with the souls of the people that it’s slain—a mystical portent that Yakuza Princess has no idea what to do with.
Even more disappointingly, the film establishes a striking setting and then essentially ignores everything that makes it so unique. Yakuza Princess is set within São Paulo’s Liberdade neighborhood, home to the world’s largest ethnic Japanese population outside of Japan, which could have allowed for an exploration of the area’s fascinating cross-cultural pollination. But outside of a few evocative nighttime shots of street markets, Yakuza Princess reduces this distinctive milieu to a cliché, indistinguishable from the neon-soaked underworld environments of countless other crime pictures. And that’s the problem with the film in a nutshell: It doesn’t mash up styles, storylines, languages, and cultures so much as it emulsifies them, rendering everything it touches into a formless, flavorless sludge.
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