Shamo (2007)

Shamo (2007) Chinese Title: 軍雞 Translation: Military(ized) Chicken

Starring: Shawn Yue, Annie Liu Xin-You, Francis Ng, Masato, Dylan Kuo Pin-Chao, Bruce Leung Siu-Lung, Ryo Ishibashi, Pei Pei Wei-Ying, Terri Kwan Wing, Hiromi Nakajima, Takuya Suzuki

Director: Soi Cheang

Action Director: Jack Wong Wai-Leung

Shamo is based on a Japanese manga of the same name, which tells the story of a young man who serves a term in a correctional facility for murdering his parents. While there, he learns karate from another one of the inmates, who is a karate master-cum-revolutionary. Once on the outside, he becomes a professional fighter of extremely questionable morals, often employing underhanded means (psychological warfare, blackmail, and even rape) in order to get the upper hand. In other words, the character of Shamo is a complete heel and a true antihero.

This live-action adaptation of the manga was brought to us by Soi Cheang, who is best known these days for martial arts films like SPL 2: A Time for Consequences and Walled In: Twilight of the Warriors. However, when this movie was made, Soi had previously made the ultra-bleak and ultra-violent crime thriller Dog Bite Dog, which is a hard film watch (let alone re-watch for the purpose of reviewing). Considering that film revolved around a professional assassin who was only marginally worse than the cops trailing him, making a movie about an unsavory character like Ryo Narushima seemed like a understandable idea.

The film opens with an idyllic family breakfast at the Narushima household. Ryo (Shawn Yue, of Dragon Tiger Gate and The Invisible Target) and his sister, Natsumi (Pei Pei, who played the mute love interest in Dog Bite Dog), are at the table enjoying a meal with their parents. The film cuts to Ryo being taken to prison as we learn that he has violently murdered his parents and confessed to the same. Ryo’s experience in prison is not a fun one: he regularly beaten, tortured, and raped by both the inmates and guards (led by the warden, played by War’s Ryo Ishibashi). He receives one visit from his sister, Natsumi, who announces that she has become a prostitute because of Japan’s culture of ostracizing anyone related to criminals, even if they themselves have done nothing wrong.

After one of his daily beatings, Ryo is about to slit his own throat on a broken toilet when he rescued by a new inmate, Kenji Kurokawa (Francis Ng, of The Mission and A Man Called Hero). Kurokawa is a karate master who was thrown in jail for murdering the Prime Minister—I’m surprised he didn’t get the death penalty for that—and is allowed by the Warden to teach karate to the inmates. Yeah, way to make hardened criminals even more dangerous. He sees potential in Ryo Narushima and teaches him, which makes Ryo strong enough to fight back against his tormentors.

Due to his being a minor, Ryo is let out after a two-year stint (unlike California, where violent offenders are often transferred to normal adult prisons after serving part of their sentence at the CYA). He dyes his hair blonde, becomes a gigolo (servicing overweight women), and is a general bully among the dregs of Japanese society. He meets a prostitute named Megumi (Annie Liu, of Invincible Dragon and The Great Grandmaster), whose nome de guerre is Natsumi. They become lovers after some initial conflict; Ryo has no problem beating women in this. A fight with some of the employees at Megumi’s hostess club spills over into a stadium where an MMA fight is being held. Ryo catches the attention of several of the big wigs from the Banryu Group, including group founder Kensuke Mochizuki (Bruce Leung, of Broken Oath and Four Shaolin Challengers) and split-off dojo leader Ryuichi Yamazaki (Dylan Kuo, of Skiptrace and Hyperspace Rescue).

Ryuichi tries to bring Ryo Narushima to his dojo to train in order to become a professional fighter in the Lethal Fight (LF) circuit—this film’s UFC equivalent. However, Ryuichi is challenged by Mochizuki and loses…and then is challenged by Ryo, and loses. His character more or less disappears from the film at this point, which makes me wonder what the point of the subplot is. Mochizuki tells Ryo that he can participate in the LF and to wait for a phone call. A fight is set up between Ryo and a Thai boxer, and he starts training. At this point, Kenji Kurokawa shows up—he got out of prison early, but the reason for that will be explained later—and starts training Ryo. Ryo wins his first professional match, winning only by a sliver when he whip-kick’s his opponent in the eye and blinds him. Mochizuki kicks Ryo out of the LF, but since Ryo is determined to fight the current champion, Naoto Sugawara (ISKA welterweight champion Masato), he resorts to underhanded means in order to get the fight scheduled…

Shamo is a Japanese/Hong Kong co-production. Most of the main cast members are from Hong Kong, as is the director and fight choreographer. Many of the people behind the camera are Japanese, as are most of the producers. The film is set in Japan (although parts were filmed in Thailand, hence a lot of Thai names in the smaller roles) and the characters are Japanese, although everybody speaks Cantonese in the movie. It is a weird mixture of cultures.

I have not read the Shamo manga, but gleaning over the synopsis at Wikipedia, it appears that this film covers the first two or three story arcs of the series. What is most noticeable in the story is how it feels like Soi Cheang actually diluted Ryo Narushima’s antiheroics in comparison with the source material. The original character was not above doing all sorts of awful, often criminal things in order to win. In this film, Ryo Narushima is a jerk, sometimes a woman-beating jerk, but he is not a complete monster. He threatens to rape Naoto Sugawara’s wife (or girlfriend), but never follows through with it, like he apparently does in the manga. Characters say that he is cruel, but he rarely comes across that way, except maybe when he’s fighting Ryuichi Yamazaki. Instead, he comes across as a bully whose bark is worse than his bite and often takes more than he dishes out. There are some other last-minute revelations that change the way we see his backstory.

Reviews point out how the dialog tries to be profound, but often comes across as weird and absurd. Case in point, while Ryo is training for his fight with the Thai boxer, Kenji shows him a reflection of the moon in a puddle and strikes it with a katana, telling him that if he can “split in the moon in half,” he’ll be ready for the fight. So, Ryo cuts himself and splatters a line of blood across the reflection of the moon, thus “splitting” it in half. Does this have anything to do with his training? No. Does it have anything to do with how he fights his opponent? No. So what was the entire point of the scene?

So what is the point of the movie? I’m not sure. It’s about a guy who studies karate in prison and goes on to become a professional kickboxer, but it’s not even really about the fights. Or at least Soi Cheang and choreographer Jack Wong don’t stage the fights to stand out from the rest of the movie. Jack Wong has spent most of his career working with other, more famous action directors, but in the past few years has gotten more acclaim for his individual choreography jobs, like Warriors of Future. The fights are all about karate and kickboxing and are staged fine, but the choreography is not particularly complex. There is also a bit of shaky cam and quick cuts in a lot of the fights, perhaps to create a comic book panel feel to the fights? There is one sequence where we see Ryo fighting some thugs inside a stadium. We see the footage of the professional fight clearly, while the other fight is depicted entirely with dueling shadows. Interesting from a visual standpoint, but choreography fans will be left wanting.

My main issue with the fighting is that Ryo is portrayed as the underdog for the entire movie. Even when his training has progressed, he often gets into group brawls with (supposedly) untrained people and gets beaten up despite being better than the people he’s fighting. The same goes for the professional fights: he gets done dirtier than Rocky in the ring, without the cathartic comeback at the end. Maybe director Soi Cheang wanted the fights to be subversive, much like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives. It is weird to see this movie about a jerk training in karate and growing in his training, only to get his ass handed to him at almost every turn. But between the thuggishly unlikeable main character, questionable decisions in fight editing and direction, and an awful TV-movie score, I cannot really recommend Shamo to anyone.