Rent Tokyo Tribe (2014)

Visually stunning but not much else - Tokyo Tribe review by Alphaville

Typical OTT Sion Sono extravaganza. This one’s a hip-hop musical with rapping gangsters and troubling sexual violence, shot with a restless camera in streets that look like a colourful fairground. The visuals, as usual, are stunning, but as a viewing experience it’s more of an elongated and uninteresting rap video than an absorbing drama. You might want to skip to the climax, which fills the whole last quarter of the 2hr run-time. It’s a stylised no-holds-barred rumble involving all the players, brutal yet playful at the same time. Only Sion Sono…

Time to break out the gold teeth, guns and girls....sigh. - Tokyo Tribe review by Strovey

Tokyo Tribe is a veritable explosion of colour, action and high-tempo rap and hip-hop music (I think, I am too old to know for sure). Now it would be nice to say it is great to see the Japanese spin on this type of music but there did not seem to be to me it was every US trope you see and so I was expecting gun-play, gold teeth and chains, gang-war, murder, women as sex-objects wearing little clothes and yup they were all there. Okay one of the main characters who could ‘look after herself’ was an attractive Japanese actor but when the leaping about kicking people started we got a fair few shots of her white knickers and in particular her crutch that I felt more than uncomfortable about.

There was a girl gang the Gira Gira Girls so there, except they were all dressed like dominatrix or sex-fetish dolls. I am fully aware that my take on the film and even lifestyle will cause spontaneous combustion in some readers but I have to be honest and of course I can’t say looking a very attractive Japanese ladies in bikinis does not fill me with revulsion but I do find it tiresome that said ladies are mainly there to dish out sex, blow-jobs or just drap over some fairly repulsive men.

I know it’s the ‘image’ of hip-hop etc, and this paints me as a Social Justice Warrior lefty libtard but if I am that then like the film I have just watched I am being true to my nature. Director Sono certainly does not let this phase and just ploughs through.

The ending of the film has been described as fun and upbeat and to an extent it is but unlike One Cut of the Dead what precedes it means it is hollow and pure fantasy. This is the basis of the film fantasy so perhaps I should take a deep breath.

Some of ‘beats laid down’ are good or merely okay and parts of the story as it bops along is funny or interesting but I cannot help feeling that in 2014 the director, Sono and Manga comic-creator Santa Inoue and could have made a mark, say something different instead of just following the path that I, a totally unhip old fart from the UK, was expecting it go.

After this film turning up as being highly recommended on various platforms I was disappointed. Clearly I am in no way the target audience and I suspect it will work very well with them, but nevertheless I did not expect to be thinking ‘really’ throughout the running time.

This was an attempt to make an all-action modern style West Side Story and in one way it succeeds but in another it fails. The audience for this will always be niche something that even haters of West Side Story cannot really claim.