It’s hard to say what’s more endearing about Takashi Miike these days: that the director of Audition and Ichi The Killer is still out there producing work at the same, alarming rate (his last release, a TV movie remake of the long-running series Unfettered Shogun, released four weeks ago) or the clear sense that he’s still enjoying himself. Miike’s one-hundred-and-somethingth film, Blazing Fists, is a story about honor and loyalty that opens on Ikutu (Danhi Kinoshita), a youth punching another through a glass door. We’re in a juvenile detention center, and this showdown will lead Ikutu and the man he’s defending, Ryoma (Kaname Yoshizawa), on the road to becoming best friends. This relationship will continue in the outside world, where a shared dream of competing in a televised UFC style event called Breaking Down awaits. Yagura is the film’s sometimes narrator. He is also, unbeknownst to his new pal, serving time for holding up Ikutu’s dad with a flick knife. If that’s not good, honest pulp, I’m not sure what is.
Versatility has always been one of Miike’s greatest strengths; the question seldom being which genre the director’s latest will dapple in than how many, and in what order. With Blazing Fists (which was written by Shin Kibayashi), Miike takes the prison drama, the boxing movie, and the mob flick and smashes them together, broken bones and all. No sane person would attempt to list the film’s many telenovela-lite plot twists, but we can confirm that the core narrative centers on Ryoma and Ikutu and a vaguely developed backstory involving the latter’s father, who is on trial for murder. (Later in the story, his prosecutor’s son surprisingly emerges as the film’s final boss.) The first key antagonists are a gang of old classmates out for revenge on Ikutu for something that happened years ago. The second are an older, gnarlier group called The Krishna. Somewhere in all the chaos, Miike finds time for a scene in which Ikutu and Yagura’s mothers eat lunch.
Blazing Fists is, to the best of my knowledge, the first sports movie in this director’s career, and there’s plenty fun to be had in watching the 64-year-old engage with the genre’s broad tropes. At their first day in the gym, Ikutu wins the respect of the team by challenging the toughest fighter––a classic move. He later appears to tempt fate by catching the eye of a girl who turns out to be the same fighter’s sister––as if there was time for anything to develop. The film’s main source of comic relief is the gym’s wily proprietor, who has a pencil moustache and wears a golden towel around his neck at all times. Amongst the film’s 20-or-so impressively distinct characters (props to the costume department), there are at least two twitchy sadists––a Miike staple. One of these is played with real menace by Gackt, a Japanese pop idol, and I couldn’t help being enamored by how Miike bad-guy-codes his layer (piles of loot, ever-burning barrel fire, slot machine––props to the production designer) or, elsewhere, the director’s brief acknowledgments of influencer culture.
Despite this embarrassment of narrative and Miike’s dogged ability to keep each plate spinning, momentum doesn’t always hold up at the pace one wishes. At its best, however, Blazing Fists zips by with flashes of surrealism and little-to-no irony. Take the scene in which Ikutu’s father, speaking through the plexiglass of his prison’s visiting room, tells his son that he will keep on fighting, and that he wants him (in case you forgot, an aspiring fighter) to keep fighting too. I’ll bite.
Blazing Fists screened at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam.