| SFIFF 51: Black Belt Review (4/08) | | Print | |
| Written by Aaron Light | |
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Action movies often get cut a lot of slack. Components such as acting, dialogue and artistic merit, things that would make or break any other kind of movie, are all allowed to go out the window, so long as the end offers a badass payoff (preferably with many heads getting smashed).
Black Belt, a Japanese film screening at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival at 8:45 p.m., 1:30 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. on April 25, 27 and 29, is being touted as a “thinking person’s martial arts movie” by the San Francisco Film Society, implying that beneath the bloodshed lies a significant message or ideal that makes the film stand out from its cinematic peers. Black Belt tries to be many things: a meditation on the proper usage of violence, a moralistic tale of early 20th-century wartime-era Japan and an exciting action movie. Unfortunately, it ends up as nothing more than another simple and formulaic foray into the martial arts genre. Set during Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1932, Black Belt follows three karate students from the same dojo who each go a different way once the army attempts to conscript them as fight instructors. Playing the roles of the three students Giryu, Choei and Taikan are Akihito Yagi, Yuji Suzuki and Tatsuya Naka, respectively. Each main actor is a karate master in real life, which helps add a certain amount of reality to the fight scenes in the movie. The main problem with Black Belt is simply how boring it is. None of the characters are engaging enough to hold most viewers’ attention, and director Shunichi Nagasaki’s decision to split the movie into three stories, each following a different student, only complicates matters. At a relatively unassuming 95-minutes, none of the characters’ stories get the attention they need to become fully fleshed out or exciting. To make matters worse, Black Belt’s ideas are laid on so thick that they might as well be propaganda. The bad guys (all officers in the military) are corrupt and contemptible, personifying nothing but greed and cruelty, while the good guys do nothing but save innocents and act modestly. The only character who is the slightest bit complex is Taikan, the student who disobeys his sensei’s orders and unwittingly becomes a pawn in the army’s plans for domination. If more of the movie were spent on his story, as opposed to that of the entirely innocuous Giryu, Black Belt might have the propulsive energy to actually make a point and engage the audience’s attention. Black Belt even finds a way to make the fight scenes boring. The scenes where the evil military captains receive their final beatdowns at the hands of the righteous karate masters offer little payoff: instead of fulfilling snaps and crunches, they are full of simple, ham-fisted thuds. Black Belt takes many risks — attempts at character development, at trying to impart an “important” message with the audience, at having a significant number of quiet moments and more — but they soon prove themselves to be duds, all adding up to a falsified, self-obsessed grandeur. Perhaps Black Belt is caught in a sort of film limbo: too ordinary to be truly terrible yet too bad to be anything interesting. Black Belt’s aspirations for greatness become its greatest weakness, making it nothing more than another pretentious, mediocre action movie. |
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to listen.
