Mark Reviews Movies: YAKUZA PRINCESS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 2, 2021

The story of Yakuza Princess features characters like the bad guy who's actually a good guy and the man whose amnesia prevents him from knowing anything about himself. There's also a whole group of retired warriors, living in a house in the middle of nowhere. The extent of their existence is, apparently, just waiting for the occasional guest, to whom they can offer a lot of vague clues and back story.

Our protagonist is the daughter of a murdered crime lord. Obviously, she doesn't know this fact (although we do, thanks to a pretty telling prologue), because that would mean this story would have to be about more than a scavenger hunt for exposition.

That's basically what Kimi Lee and Fernando Toste's screenplay entails, as Akemi (MASUMI) must look for and eventually confront a past of which she has never known. Twenty years prior in Osaka, an entire family, save for a 1-year-old girl, is murdered at a party. On her 21st birthday, the now São Paulo-based Akemi is learning to fight with a sword, mourning her recently murdered grandfather, and finds herself harassed and hunted by jerks from a karaoke bar, before her apartment is also infiltrated by two other deadly guys.

All of this, of course, is intended to be very mysterious and very enticing, although the screenplay (based on a graphic novel by Danilo Beyruth) lets its obsession with mystery get the better of it. The foundation of this plot, which revolves around the grandfather's murder, is treated with the same level of ambiguity as the rest of the plot. The screenplay and director Vicente Amorim are so busy establishing the puzzle and this generic world of crime that a few vital things come as a complete surprise, seemingly out of nowhere—namely, that Akemi has a grandfather, that he's dead, and that he was murdered.

Anyway, Akemi isn't much of a character beyond her history, but at least that her puts her a step ahead of the other major characters. One is an enigmatic foreigner (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) of unknown origin, of an unknown past, and of unknown motives.

He awakens in a hospital bed, and the doctors speak of how he has no memory of who he is or what he has done. They call him a ghost, which seems like a good way to refer to the character, but the credits inform us he's called Shiro (That only complicates matters, since that name serves as the title of Beyruth's comic, but given how the movie ends with some sequel-setup, one imagines he's the actual protagonist of the series, as unlikely as it seems here).

The only clue to his identity is a sword, which caused some significant damage to his body (which conveniently goes away) and some stylish cosmetic wounds to his face. After escaping from the hospital, the ghost Shiro goes looking for the owner of the sword and, eventually, ends up in Akemi's apartment.

The other major character is Takeshi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), a lieutenant in the yakuza in Osaka, who learns something from a man being tortured by his underlings. We're never quite sure what that something is, except that it likely and vaguely has to do with Akemi, but clearly, it's information that can't get out to certain people. Takeshi shoots his henchmen, before shooting the guy who knows the information. He travels to São Paulo, looking to kill Akemi, Shiro, or both of them. Who really knows, and more importantly, why should we really care?

There are answers to all of these mysteries—what Takeshi actually wants, how Shiro ended up in the hospital, who murdered the grandfather—and the setup of some more story ideas—that there's a generations-long battle for power within the yakuza, that Shiro might not be the honorable fighter he seems to be, that Akemi might actually be an active participant in some future story. This movie, though, amounts to a lot of travel from location to location (always from the help of someone providing an address), a lot of dialogue that hints at some answer, and the occasional direct statement of the truth, after all of the traveling and hinting have run their course (but not before the process becomes tedious). Occasionally, the walking and talking are interrupted by running, jumping, shooting, and sword-swinging, in action sequences that feel more like delay tactics than anything else.

In delaying all of this information about the characters for so long, Yakuza Princess sabotages itself. There isn't really a story here, only the sluggish revelation of details that could result in one.

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