Simply put, it’s not an edition of the Fantasia Film Festival without a Takashi Miike flick (or two, or three). One of the sprawling Canadian genre fest’s claims to fame is introducing the director to North American audiences in the 1990s, and Fantasia has since remained loyal to the Japanese maverick, even when the films have questionable commercial appeal to mainstream Western audiences, as is the case with manga adaptation “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable Chapter I.” Regardless, the film — receiving an opening night berth for its North American Premiere here in Montreal — is candy-colored catnip to the insatiable Fantasia crowd. While not quite vintage Miike, “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” is a faithful to its source material with just enough bursts of mania to appeal to the filmmaker’s fanbase.
Although the “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” manga has been serialized since 1987, Miike draws his cinematic take from the fourth volume of the same subtitle (‘Diamond is Forever’). Buttoned-up high school student Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) moves to the seaside Morioh Town, and becomes fascinated with 17-year-old Josuke — the titular JoJo (Kento Yamazaki) — after he defends Koichi from bullies. It turns out that JoJo is a Stand user, and his Stand Shining Diamond has the ability to mend and heal.
Koichi’s arrival coincides with the appearance of other Stand users intent on transforming the sleepy community into a battleground: the villainous brothers Keicho (Masaki Okada) and Okuyasu (Mackenyu) and enigmatic ally Jotaro (Yusuke Iseya, recognizable from Miike’s “13 Assassins”). Oh, and all of these characters have outrageous hairstyles — this seems to be the cost of entry for Stand users and, for JoJo, any insults directed towards his ‘do are an immediate trigger for his avatar.
The famously rowdy Fantasia audience definitely made it clear that Miike’s adaptation of the long-running manga is stuffed with Easter eggs for fans. Even so, ‘JoJo’ is surprisingly accessible to neophytes, even going so far as to over-explain the underlying mythology and restrictions to characters’ powers (for example, it’s stated multiple times that Shining Diamond cannot heal JoJo himself or resurrect others from the dead). The chosen story arc translates well to film, with a handful of memorable set pieces built in. Delightfully, the Stand abilities escalate from Infinity Gems-lite — Jotaro’s Stand freezes time, while Okuyasu’s ‘cuts’ space — to totally bonkers, particularly the reveal of the mechanics behind Keicho’s ‘Worse Company’ power, which has no grounding in elemental or space-time forces.
Miike leans into the inherent ridiculousness of his source material, which makes for an entertaining experience overall but consequentially leaves the dramatic beats to ring hollow. The cast is game to chew through as much scenery as possible — Yamazaki’s JoJo is always ready for battle, his head permanently cocked tauntingly — even if there isn’t a great deal going on in terms of character development. The target audience for ‘JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’ is clearly the fans of the comics, and the director plays to this demographic at the expensive of sincere dramaturgy. The less said about the screen time afforded to the female characters, the better. Perhaps Nana Komatsu‘s Yukako is being set up for future installments, but her negligible presence here reads similar to the most inert world-building efforts in American comic book movies.
The veteran Japanese director brings his genre experience to bear on ‘JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure,’ which leaps from film noir to horror to superhero styles, all equally credible. For a four-quadrant Japanese tentpole, the movie gets surprisingly gory, at least in comparison to its American counterpart in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (albeit a gleeful kind of violence that muddles a moral message on power and responsibility).
Outside of the strength of its bombastic set pieces — such as the Stands of JoJo and Okuyasu locked in battle like swirl of pink and blue cotton candy — the greatest virtue of ‘JoJo’ is likely the cinematography and set design. Much of ‘JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’ is shot on exterior sets, with the Spanish city of Sitges doubling for Morioh Town. It’s an unexpected and worthy expenditure for a Japanese film, one that expands the scope of the burgeoning fictional universe with its picturesque European architecture. The last act takes place almost entirely in a crumbling mansion, but the developed set design of individual rooms, as well as the courtyard, keeps the climax visually engaging.
There is something reassuringly consistent about Takashi Miike’s work in the past decade, even with genre films like “For Love’s Sake,” “Ace Attorney” and “Shield of Straw” that didn’t circulate quite so widely. Roughly one hundred films deep into his corpus, the filmmaker is as steady as an old hand as Clint Eastwood or Woody Allen. Miike builds virtuosic Scope sequences without breaking a sweat, and at a staggering pace — a sort of journeyman approach to wild source material. The curation (or lack thereof) at Fantasia makes his talent exceptionally clear, screening the director’s features amongst a wide sampling of commercial Japanese cinema; something like ‘JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’ may seem unapproachably “bizarre,” but its also adept in its own way, especially when placed in the proper context. [B-]