V-Cinema Essentials 2: Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet

Time to return into the depths of the V-Cinema Essentials set, and the second film within it. It happens to have one of those titles that intrigues, mainly because of not really knowing what it means: Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet. 

It would be generous to call Junko (Show Aikawa) a low-level yakuza, but be that as it may, his boss, Yoshikawa (Toru Minegishi), decides he’s one of his three men who must avenge the murder of one of their clan. With an assassination ahead of him, Junko falls for American car-loving Yumeko (Chikako Aoyama), who lives with him in an abandoned building. 

The moment we meet Junko we are shown the extent to how much of a loser he is. The film perfectly demonstrates Junko’s place in the world: he’s cleaning the bathroom, even down to pointing the toilet paper, before his boss enters for a piss; as Yoshikawa leaves his car, Junko scurries to open the car boot, lifts his boss’s coat hanging from a bar and rushes to drape it over his boss’s shoulders. He’s a lapdog who thinks he’s an attack dog. He thinks he’s cool, that he’s on the inside, but we see how clueless he is within the murky world of the yakuza. 

He doesn’t even realise his bar hostess girlfriend, whose money he lives off, is sleeping with men for money along with the rest of the women in the bar. She talks tougher than Junko does and knows how the underworld works. Junko is as close to a patsy as you could ask for.  

He’s a patsy at a crossroads too. Because Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet is a film of two halves. The first half introduces Junko, demonstrates his ineptitude at life and especially at being a yakuza; this is where much of the film’s energy and imagination come in to play. As Junko first meets Yumeko, she’s stolen his boss’s car, which Junko is using for the night. The film plays the yakuza lightly, including Joe Shishido (yes, hamster cheeks himself), as Junko’s yakuza uncle who we first meet urinating into a plant pot in a bar. And it comes to the fore when we start to understand the title of the film. Bullets are assassins. Zooming is the act of trying to get out of killing and doing the subsequent jail time. This throws up some wonderful counterpoints: man-mountain Rikiya Yasuoka as Kikuchi, rumbles how he’s going to take revenge for his clan but ends up shooting himself on a rollercoaster to get out of the assassination job.  

The second half of the film runs out of steam pretty quickly. Door/Door 2 director Banmei Takahashi seems to have little to play with. Junko finds himself with Yumeko in an almost abandoned building, questioning whether he should shoot or zoom. The gun he is given he almost seems to forget. When Yumeko takes it, she fires it and with each shot she gets increasingly horny (“my body is throbbing”, she says), and cue the excuse for a few sex scenes where Takahashi’s pink film origins come to the fore, but it feels a little dry and like dull filler because the story seem to have little more to give us, simply getting bogged down in sex for nothing more than cheap exposure. Chikako Aoyama as Yumeko seems to be there for nothing more than her willingness to swing her pendulous breasts. She’s none too engaging as an actor, speaking her lines but with no particular screen presence, which is a disappointment as she’s the opposite of Junko’s previous girlfriend who has a much more bracing effect. She is the wisecracking dame, who has the yakuza mindset but she is mostly absent from the latter half of the film. Where she does enter into it, she falls right back into character and evinces the self-absorbed smartness of a seasoned yakuza, presumably because she’s been around enough of them and has learned how to get ahead. 

At 85-minutes the film is arguably overlong due to the second half drag. Going full pink film with speckled moments of ‘zoom’ doubt confuses what the film is about. It’s still relatively light in tone but those moments of narrative and character interest dissipate. It's a shame too, because when Junko could possibly pull out of the hit, he’s watched by one of Yoshikawa’s henchmen from a distance, but not as much is made of this instead moving the film into... another sex scene with further pendulous swinging of breasts. Equally, Shishido in the few moments he enters the film gives off a sense of cool but you also feel he’s having fun playing his role - enjoying his elder statesman actor part. Walking into shot and immediately punching a policeman, you feel he read the script and thought I’m going to enjoy this and does. Could the latter half of the film made more of Shishido and Junko’s relationship? Maybe so, but this is not really a thriller, nor an action film, but a movie about a young man questioning what he’s doing in life, wrapped up in some yakuza trappings.  

Had the film kept up the energy of its first half, where sometimes moments that seem random but amusing later become meaningful to the story, it could have been amusing and emotionally engaging. Instead Neo Chinpira: Zoom Goes the Bullet felt like a bit of a damp squib as it lost focus - by the end I was watching the ticking of the clock until the final moments.