Re: Born (2016)

Re: Born (2016) Original Title: RE:BORN リボーン Translation: Re:Born

Starring: Tak Sakaguchi, Yura Kondo, Takumi Saitô, Hitomi Hasebe, Mariko Shinoda, Masanori Mimoto, Hiroko Yashiki, Makoto Sakaguchi, Orson Mochizuki, Kenta, Yoshitaka Inagawa, Akio Ôtsuka

Director: Yuji Shimomura

Action Director: Yoshitaka Inagawa

Zero Range Combat. This is a martial arts style founded in the early-mid 2000s by Japanese martial artist Yoshitaka Inagawa. The general idea of Zero Range Combat is to develop a system of close-quarters combat that could be taught to military operatives and law enforcement officers. The emphasis is on weapons, especially knives, but extends to objects like batons, flashlights, and even swords. The style is a synthesis of elements from Japanese Kobudo (or weapons), Muay Boran, Sambo, the Russian military art of Systema, Filipino Escrima, and Jieitaikakutōjutsu, which is the knife and bayonet system of fighting taught in the Japanese Self-Defense Force.

Re:Born was meant to be Tak Sakaguchi’s swan song from the action movie genre, after having worked in it for more than a decade, starting with the cult favorite Versus. Actually, his retirement started in 2013 following the completion of Sion Sono’s ode to guerilla filmmaking, Why Don’t You Play in Hell? However, so many people reacted with sadness to Sakaguchi’s departure from cinema that Tak decided to do one more action movie in hopes of making his fans happy. The resulting film was Re:Born, which may have started life as a Sion Sono script for a film called Kenkichi. The resulting film covers no new ground from a plot perspective, but tries to do for Zero Range Combat what Ong Bak did for Muay Thai, or Merantau and The Raid did for Silat.

The plot of the film draws heavily from films like Broken Path (2007) and Black Mask (1996), and is similar to that same year’s Headshot (2016) and the Shaw Brothers classic Avenging Eagle (1978). Tak Sakaguchi plays Toshiro, a quiet man who runs a small convenience store and lives with his niece, Sachi (Yura Kondo). Toshiro is actually a former special forces operative and assassin who was once known as “The Ghost.” He left his employer, The Phantom (Akio Otsuda, who voiced Snake in the Japanese version of “Metal Gear Solid” and Batou in the Ghost in the Shell films), after getting tired of the Phantom kidnapping children and training/brainwashing them into becoming assassins. Sachi is not his actual niece, but one of the kids whom he rescued.

Toshiro lives a quiet existence, working and raising Sachi, and occasionally visiting a fellow operative, Kenji (Takumi Saito, of 13 Assassins and Shin Godzilla), who became paraplegic after saving Toshiro’s life. He also finds time to go to a psychologist, Dr. Shizuka Matsumoto (Hitomi Hasebe, of “Ultraman Geed” and RoboGeisha) Toshiro finds himself being stalked by numerous assassins, all of whom he dispatches with lightning quick efficiency. It becomes clear that the Phantom is back and is hunting him and he teams up with a pair of assassins, Max (Orson Mochizuki) and Masaru (Kenta), to rescue Sachi when the Phantom’s assassins kidnap her.

The second half of the film is one long action sequence as Toshiro, Max, and Masaru have to infiltrate the Phantom’s base, located in a Japanese forest. They dispatch platoon and platoon as they work their way up the wooded hill until they finally can enter the base. Toshiro must finally face down with his former comrade Abyss Walker (Yoshitaka Inagawa), who, unlike Toshiro, is an assassin who simply loves to kill. I mean, the movie opens with the Phantom’s men running a combat simulator in hunting down Toshiro, only for Abyss Walker to show up and kill everybody for no reason whatsoever. Abyss Walker is the unreliable wildcard that the Phantom tolerates only because he is only person whose skills come close to matching Toshiro’s.

An alternate title for Re:Born could be Throat Slit: The Motion Picture. The entire purpose of Zero Range Combat appears to be finding the quickest angle and movement to reach the opponent’s throat and slice it. Or stab it. Or perforate it. Or puncture it. It feels like a mixture of a layman’s understanding of Ninjitsu mixed with Special Forces knife fighting. That is certainly how Tak Sakaguchi plays his character in his fights. He sneaks up on an opponent and slits their throat. Or parries an attack and goes for the throat. Or parries an attack, twists a limb, and then slices the throat. His character is also super-fast and can dodge bullets (according to Wikipedia, this is one of the claims that Zero Range Combat makes for its practitioners), which prompts his opponents to switch to knives and close-quarters combat, giving him the opportunity to slit more throats.

Tak Sakaguchi uses mainly knives and fisticuffs in his fights. For the latter, there seems to be a mixture of small two-edged knives, one-edged knives, and intimidating curved blades that look like something you’d see in an Iko Uwais movie. The big weapon that Sakaguchi and Yoshitaka Inagawa use in their action sequences in a curved blade that is perpendicular to the hilt. When those two finally square off at the end, they use a mixture of knife fighting and an open-handed fighting style that my colleague Paul Bramhall described as “drunken capoeira,” although to me it looked like “Spazzed-Out Monkey Fist.” 

Right before the three protagonists start their raid on the Phantom’s compound, there is a scene where they are discussing how Toshiro let Sachi be kidnapped because he could track to her to their base. Max hands him a handgun that Toshiro examines, holds, points in a mock fashion, and then returns to Max. He then takes a knife from Masaru, holds it, and says that it will suffice. I imagined in my mind an alternate scene where Masaru would hold a tray full of knives and bladed weapons—switchblades, bowie knives, butterfly knives, kama (sickles), etc.—and Toshiro would just stock up on bladed weapons that he would be able to cut throats with. Now, imagine my joy after watching Toshiro slaughter dozens of soldiers with regular knives (and a folding shovel) when the second-to-last platoon shows up to stop him, and he randomly whips out a pair of kama and goes to town on them. That made me particularly happy, especially since they had not been established as a weapon in his arsenal before. It almost feels like I willed that scene to happen.

Tak Sakaguchi ended up NOT retiring and was back in the game after two years making movies, including Crazy Samurai Musashi, which is essentially a 70-minute sword fight (without cuts, I believe). He also had a supporting role in Kingdom, where he plays a Qin military officer who uses a “Drunken Chanbara” style of fighting. His most recent film was One Percenter, a meta-esque film about an action actor facing off against a pair of Yakuza gangs who have interrupted the filming of one of his movies. People have called that Re:Born 2. I posted at the Kung Fu Fandom the other day that I would like to see Tak Sakaguchi take on Donnie Yen in the upcoming Flash Point film. Probably will never happen, but a man can dream.

Is Re:Born going to be known the greatest martial arts action film ever made? No. But it does have martial arts action in spades and it’s all well-choreographed, even if a bit repetitive. As a showcase for Tak Sakaguchi’s bad-assery, however, it gets major points. I’m glad that he hasn’t retired yet.