Samurai Cop starts off pretty normal. Two cops, Joe and Frank, are going after some cocaine smugglers, aided by Peggy, their eye in the sky. Everything is straightforward and by the book. And then the car chase begins.
It's a familiar thing, in a way, though I can cite no other movies off the top of my head that do it. There are actions films just like this that have a few scenes right near the start that mimic "real" movies almost perfectly. Perhaps this is the footage they shot first, and showed to investors, to trick them into thinking they were getting anything other than Samurai Cop. And then, once they had their budget secured and squared away, they filmed that car chase scene. And Amir Shervan's apparent desire to be the world's biggest ten year old began.
Joe is a samurai as well as a cop, and with Frank he chases these coke dealers through the requisite City of Boxes, all of which are smashed. Yes, it's one of those car chases. At this point in cinematic history, it's not a true car chase if there aren't some conspicuously-placed boxes (fruits and veggies optional) for everyone to smash into. Anyway, once they arrest/slaughter the coke dealers, Joe and Frank start going after the Katana Gang, controlled by the mulleted Mr. Fujiyama. Aiding Fujiyama in his drug empire are martial arts master Okamura (a creatively named character played by Gerald Okamura) and evil samurai Yamashita. Yamashita must be a codename of some kind, because he's played by Robert Z'Dar, who, for those of you unfamiliar with his work, is as white as a sheet of printer paper. He turns in a legitimately great performance here, which easily rises over what most of his colleagues turned in. Fujiyama commands him to kill one of the hospitalized victims of Joe and Frank's coke bust: "I want his head! And I want it right here, on this piano!" "I will take his head, and I will place it on your piano," Yamashita replies.
Joe ends up getting involved with Jennifer, whose family owns a restaurant that Fujiyama helped raise out of debt. This angers Fujiyama, who wanted Jennifer all for himself. The war between the Katanas and the Samurai Cop heats up until Fujiyama is torturing Joe's friends--threatening to castrate Frank, burning Peggy with hot grease, and killing a cop he worked with on raids, along with his wife. But this is an action movie, so you better believe all the bad guys end up dead, one way or another.
There is so much that is just done wrong in this movie. The sex scenes are astonishingly bad, even by the usual "sex through the undies" standards. We get many scenes of men in Speedos with full cock outlines visible, and none of it is welcome, especially if it comes from Joe. Joe is perfect, though. His beyond-shoulders hair and ludicrously intense face make him seem like the opposite of someone who should be a cop. The fact that he runs around shooting wantonly and chopping people's limbs off doesn't help matters. This is yet another movie where laws are more like guidelines, along which those in authority may impose their own moral beliefs rather than following those that might be "popular" or "ethically acceptable." I think there are a few moments though where it questions its own stance on police brutality (which is that it's okay as long as the people you're dismembering are bona fide evil). There's an amazing bit were Joe is making full of Chief for "not wanting no more dead bodies," plus a later bit where he says, "If it's Okamura [at this house] we'll arrest him; if it's the wrong house we'll apologize the owner, standard police procedure." They don't go in guns blazing for this scene but it's easy to imagine them doing so. In this universe, unarmed civilians are shunted to a pocket dimension for safekeeping when fights break out, unless they're romantically involved with the main characters--then they can be used as hostages.
This movie does some other stuff wrong besides saying that police brutality is an okay thing to do. It's kind of hella racist? Joe messes up the Japanese characters' names on purpose (calling them "Omaha" and "Yamaha"), brings up their ethnicity for no reason, and calls Jennifer, the white girl in Fujiyama's company, "all-American." There's also an oddly-inserted gay waiter character from Costa Rica whose "comically" long name is brought up for no other reason than to drag Hispanic people. Finally, there's the bizarre incident where, when Frank (a black man) is threatened with castration, his dick is called "a gift--a black gift." I don't even know what to make of that. This movie is fucking weird.
Finally, there's a wonderful cascade of trash besides all this. When sneaking into the hospital to put that guy's head on Fujiyama's piano, Robert D'Zar disguises himself as a doctor--for no reason. This never comes up in any way. While he and his assistant are escaping the hospital, they're confronted by two security people who have the same dub actor. When someone asks Joe what katana means, he translates it as "Japanese sword," which is, um, not exactly correct. Fujiyama sends guys to break Joe's legs twice, because the screenwriter keeps forgetting scenes that have already happened. Then, when we see Robert D'Zar having sex, we have the opposite problem of the sex scene from The Room--here, the woman in question seems to think that Robert Z'Dar's dick is in his belly button! (You fool, everyone knows Robert Z'Dar's dick is in his chin.) Oh, and I can't consider this review complete without quoting this scene--an exchange between Joe and a random nurse.
Nurse: "Do you like what you see?"
Joe: "I love what I see."
"Do you want to touch what you see?"
"Yes. Yes I would."
"Would you like to go out with me?"
"Yes. Yes I would."
"Would you like to fuck me?"
"Bingo."
"Then let's see what you got." *Gropes his pants* "Doesn't interest me. Nothing there."
"Nothing there? What would interest you? Something the size of a jumbo jet?"
"Have you been circumcized? Because the doctor must have cut a big portion of it off."
Both of them deliver these lines like they're kids doing bad impressions of Robby the Robot.
I think that's a good place to end this review.
If you liked this review and would like to see more like it, you can support the site on Patreon! Also, you can like the A-List on Facebook to get updates!
No comments:
Post a Comment