Takashi Miike has hit the director career sweet spot, being both feted at major festivals abroad and scoring at the box office at home, often with the same film. (Hollywood directors, by contrast, typically get more industry cred for a big opening weekend than a Cannes invitation.) Still, this onetime king of the straight-to-video cult shocker continues to push boundaries, showing in the 2012 parody musical "Ai to Makoto (For Love's Sake)" and the somber 2011 samurai drama "Ichimei (Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai)" that he can conquer — or rather Miike-ize — any genre.
Miike's latest, "Wara no Tate (Shield of Straw)," is his attempt to make a thriller on a Hollywood scale, complete with spectacular stunts, panicking crowds and hairbreadth escapes against impossible odds. Seeing the trailer, which assembles the best action bits into one eye-popping, adrenalin-pumping rush, it's hard to believe that the same director once got his biggest effects with ridiculously cheap means, as in the notorious foot-sawing sequence of 1999's "Odishon (Audition)," whose big shock was delivered by a common tool found in many homes, those of psychotics included.
But fans will recognize Miike's characteristic affinity for extremes in "Shield of Straw." A high-concept entertainment of a type beloved by the local industry, with a hyped-to-the-max plot that features death-defying heroics, the film pushes beyond its own cliches to an existential knife's edge where the cop hero (Takao Osawa) is tested to the moral core of his being. And he is not the only one: The film is more notable for its high number of emotional meltdowns than its cars crashed and bullets fired.