Since his start as a director in 1991, Takashi Miike has accumulated nearly 100 credits, including his output for television broadcast and straight-to-video release. Far from being the faceless journeyman this number suggests, Miike is a genre auteur who has put his individual stamp on his films, with extreme violence, kinky sex, black humor and unbridled imagination being his familiar signatures.
And yet his latest, "The Mole Song: Hong Kong Capriccio," again reminded me that there is also a wide gap between good Miike and bad Miike. After the fiasco of "Terra Formars," a misbegotten venture into sci-fi that died at the box office earlier this year, he has bounced back strongly with this full-throttle yakuza comedy, a follow-up to the similarly deranged 2013 "The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji" ("Mogura no Uta: Sennyu Sosakan Reiji").
Based on a hit comic by Noboru Takahashi and scripted by the multitalented Kankuro Kudo, this second film again centers on Reiji Kikukawa (Toma Ikuta), an underachieving cop given the suicidal task of infiltrating a yakuza gang. After some hair-raising tests of his manhood in the first film, he succeeds — too well, in fact, for his police superiors, who suspect he has gone over to the dark (or rather gold-snakeskin-suit) side.