Sailor Suit and Machine Gun
Year: 2016
Director: Koji Maeda
Rating: 5.0
Godard said something like you only need
a girl and a gun to make a movie, but the Japanese do that one better - a
girl in a school uniform and a machine gun is all you need to make a movie.
They proved this with the original Sailor Suit and Machine Gun back in 1981
with idol star Hiroko Yakushimaru famous for an iconic image of her blasting
away with a machine gun at a bunch of Yakuza hooligans to deadly effect.
This spawned two TV series and now this film some many years later. It wasn't
quite clear for a while whether this is a sequel or a remake but I think
remake is closer to the mark.
This time around it stars another idol
singer, Kanna Hashimoto, who is as cute as the dickens and who has acquired
such nicknames as "beyond cute local idol" and "beyond angelic idol". And
she is, being lucky if she hits the 4 foot mark. If they had a Japanese version
of the Hobbit she would not need special effects to portray one of them.
So seeing her with a machine gun seems a bit ridiculous but at the same time
who can resist that. At the end of the film she sings the same theme song
that Hiroko sang in the first film.
I went into this thinking that with the
intervening 35 years that there would be a lot more graphic violence just
to reflect the times we live in - but if anything it was more family friendly
and as soft as a kitten - till - till around the 70 minute mark when it explodes
into mayhem and bloodshed with a huge shootout leaving bodies littering the
floor like leaves in an autumn wind. Where did that come from but to paraphrase
Hiroko in the first film when she shoots up the joint "It felt so good".
After cuddly sentiments for more than an hour, this was like a welcome stick
of dynamite in a bouquet of flowers.
Izumi (Kanna) is just a normal high school
girl who inherited a Yakuza clan through bloodline when her uncle was assassinated.
But she disbanded the clan and opened up a café with three of her
uncle's old followers now helping her out. They are not exactly threatening
as they are closer to the Three Stooges than three Yakuza stooges. And that
sets the tone of the film for much of the way - comical, sweet and goofy.
But circumstances force Izumi back into the Yakuza world again and she has
to don her sailor suit school uniform and load a machine gun and go to war.
But in the end the film lacks the guts
to go where it needed to go and that is very much to its detriment and not
at all what fansboys wanted. Still outside of Ma Barker and a few other films
such as Brigitte Lin in Pink Force Commando, how often do we get to see a
woman yield a machine gun. In this case, a 4 foot teenage one. Not as good
as the original but it has its moments.
