Battlefield Baseball
Directed by: Yudai Yamiguchi
Year: 2003
Running Time: 87 minutes
Let me start out by being
kind. There are seemingly a number of people who like this film and make
postings to various sites lauding the movie for its clever tongue in cheek
irreverent send up of the sports mentality in Japan. There are also a lot
of people who are shut ins, eat peanut butter sandwiches every day and collect
lint for a hobby. I suspect there is a correlation between these two populations.
Rarely have I experienced such a boorish and amateurish effort as this (well,
except for Bush in the debates of course) that hits you over the head repeatedly
with its lame attempts at humor. This is comedy for electro shock patients.
Or maybe I just don’t get it in the same way that Beavis and Butthead never
appealed to me much. I am old fashioned about humor – it should be funny –
not stupid. This film aims for stupid and hits it like a procession of Texas
beauty pageant contestants.
Perhaps my main complaint
though is this was exactly what director Yudai Yamiguchi was trying to do.
His goal here was to make a cult film. This was my issue with “Wild Zero”
as well though that was a much more ambitious film than this. Cult films
should be accidental – serious efforts tempered by artistic incompetence
– but that’s not the case here I suspect. It was more like lets take Zombies
and mix it with baseball – add in some really bad over the top acting along
with clunky action choreography - and we have a film that has “cult” smeared
all over its face like a drooling idiot. Nothing against drooling idiots
of course. I just don’t want to spend 90-minutes with them in my living room.
Yamiguchi has worked with the currently ultra-hot, ultra-hip director Ryuhei
Kitamura (Versus, Azumi, Aragami) as both an assistant director and a scriptwriter
– and Kitamura returns the favor by producing this film – but Kitamura’s
films are all about kinetic visual movement and slashing camera motion -
they aren’t really smart films – but they constantly delight and surprise
you – but Battlefield Baseball actually goes out of its way to downplay all
of these elements. Every time you think the film is finally revving up to
have some out of control visually bombastic adrenaline driven fun, it cuts
away and returns when the action is over and the outcome is displayed. Whether
this was driven by a miniscule budget or as a cheap laugh I am not sure but
by the third time I was more than a little frustrated by its tease with no
follow through. Worse the film doesn’t actually have any baseball in it!
But to be fair again, the film wasn’t at all what I was expecting – if you
go in expecting a Farrelly like comedy with the subtlety of an air raid on
Baghdad, this may very well be more enjoyable. And it needs a lot of good
will from the viewer to overcome its limitations – sort of like the kid who
knocks on your door on Halloween with only a paper bag covering his head
and still expects a treat.
Poor old Seido High School
- all they want to do is get to the big baseball tournament at Koshien and
bring the trophy home for school and glory. They learn though that their
first opponent is the dreaded Gedo High who they lost to some years previously.
Not lost the game mind you, they lost their lives. Gedo High are a bunch
of chainsaw hacking, neck breaking, face ripping zombies whose motto is “there
are no rules in the game”. So before the umpire even gets a chance to bellow
out “play ball” they attack their opponents and kill them. I wish these guys
would play the New York Yankees. They were banned for a while for this little
indiscretion, but they are back again. Once the baseball loving principal
hears of this he goes into a terrible depression and wants to take his team
out of the tournament – but upon the scene comes a new student – Jubeh (Tak
Sakaguchi) - an incredible pitcher – with a fastball that literally
goes through you – with a reputation of being a killer. Trouble is he doesn’t
want to play any more having had a horrible experience earlier in his life
– which he breaks out into song about and is the only inspired moment of
the film. Still they persuade him to return to the sport he loves and they
decide to take on Gedo High. Many limbs later . . . .
This is pretty much the plot of the film, but there are loads of absurd threads
brought in that should have been funny but just fell flat for me – like the
mother (played I think by a man?) of the wimpy but determined ball player
Four Eyes (Atsushi Ito) who refuses to allow him to play and beats the hell
out of him when he does with her kung fu skills – or the character who keeps
dying and coming back being played by a different actor - or the satiric
soap opera moments in which there is all of a sudden a crowd present that
breaks into applause as a dramatic resolution is made to choir like music
– or the three cheerleaders doing pom pom displays during the rumble. In
more facile hands perhaps these would have felt cleverer, but this just feels
sophomorically crude at times with little flow from scene to scene as it
takes on a skit like sensibility. Still this was a debut work from the director
and there is enough uniqueness in here to make me curious about what he will
do next.
My rating for this film: 5.0
Ok - I re-watched this
and had forgotten that I wrote a review all those years ago! It is called
the aging process. So here is my most recent one.
Baseball can be a contact sport in Japan.
Way back in 2003 or thereabouts we showed this film in our Subway Cinema
Festival. I thought it was terrible but was out voted by the others. The
audience as far as I recollect liked it. I didn't understand why then and
still don't. I figured it was time for a revisit to celebrate the soon to
be opening baseball season. To see if my taste has changed. For the worse.
Thankfully, no. Still a stupid snore. In truth this film has as much to do
with baseball as a poke in the eye or a poached egg. Or a detached head.
Or arm. Or leg. It's a comedy so silly, exaggerated and detached from reality
that I was bored out of my mind. With a few exceptions. When the hero has
to free his teammate from the cage his mother has put him into, the fight
between him and the rough and ready mother is good fun - it reminded me of
Kung Fu Hustle for a minute. I get that the film is making fun of a lot of
things - baseball fanaticism, school fervor, melodramas, zombies - but does
it with a sledgehammer. Its manga petticoats are showing.
The Seido High coach Kocho thinks the team
has a great chance to get to the Koshien Tournament which is the annual High
School Championship. They have a pitcher who can throw the ball in the 90s
and Gori can hit anything out of the park. But then he gets the bad news that
their first opponent is Gedo High School. He collapses on the floor. Not
because they are good but because they kill the other side. Literally. You
see once you are on the field, everything is legal. As the Gedo Coach says
"These are the rules. There are no rules". There is no baseball played but
the bats come in handy. The Gedo team shows up looking like leftovers from
the Walking Dead. All the Siedo players are killed but we don't see that
- just the aftermath of the players and their various parts left on the field.
We don't see how it happened. Damn. The director Yûdai Yamaguchi certainly
didn't show that restraint later with Chromartie High or Meatball Machine
in which splatter was the name of the game. This though is his debut and
I expect he didn't have the budget for it. There are only three cheerleaders
and one person and his dog in the stands - reinforcing how small a budget
they had.
Their only hope for revenge is Jubeh, a
transfer student who has been kicked out of various schools and has a liking
for violence. He loves baseball but has sworn never to play it again - in
song he tells us that his pitches are so fast that he killed his father while
playing catch - it went through him. He goes to face Gedo on his own but others
come out - Gori was brought back to life as a robot, another as a cyborg,
the mother shows up and the fight is on. At one point in the film Jubeh is
killed but meets his father in heaven riding a bike and is sent back. That
really doesn't do justice to how idiotic this film is. Every moment is either
comically overly melodramatic or overly stupid. Jubeh is played by Tak Sakaguchi
who has become almost an action cult figure. Before this he was in Versus
and Aragami, both directed by Ryûhei Kitamura, who produced this film.
I wish they had given him better action scenes to be in. Just not my
cup of tea, then or now but clearly liked by many others. Once you get past
the shock value of how idiotic it is, it loses its punch quickly.
Rated 4.0
