WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle

A veritable epic compared to its predecessor, ‘Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle’ clocks in, staggeringly, at almost an hour and a quarter. Okay, one hour ten allowing for an opening credits sequence that basically recaps the earlier film.

‘HRM: BB’ takes place an unspecified time after ‘HRM’ – long enough, it would seem, for Milly (Miki Mizuno) to develop enough of a reputation that Hura (Nao Nagasawa), a woman mourning the brutal death of her lover, seeks her out to ask her assistance in gaining revenge; but with earlier events still recent enough that the Jack Brothers’ associates Ikku and Hyuma* – themselves brothers – have only just picked up Milly’s trail in their quest for revenge.

Milly, living in heavily armoured isolation, is initially resistant to Hura’s request. No sooner has Hura arrived, though, than she is injured in an attack on Milly’s stronghold. Milly sees off her antagonists and takes Hura to a surgeon she knows at a fortified bazaar called Land where, it seems, everything is available – from medicine to weaponry to body art – if you’ve got the requisite amount of no-questions-asked cash.

The one element of its set-up that ‘Hard Revenge Milly’ failed to exploit beyond the odd moody visual was its implied post-apocalyptic setting. In ‘Bloody Battle’, wastelands and decayed cityscapes are the order of the day. With Land, there’s a sense of an edgy new society establishing itself. Enough ideas and images pattern the film to suggest that with a better budget and a little more depth to his scripts writer/director Takanori Tsujimoto might create something truly iconic. He certainly has an intriguing enough character in Milly (here given some pertinent backstory) and an athletic and strikingly attractive actress in Mizuno. And it has to be noted that Mizuno shows much greater facility in the fight scenes in this instalment.

Tsujimoto doesn’t quite up the villainy on this one, however, with Ikku and Hyuma coming on a bit like Laurel and Hardy if Oliver Hardy were gay. The fact of Ikku’s sexuality is questionable. On one hand, it’s refreshing to see the grubby old woman-in-peril scenario curtailed by Ikku grinding the would-be rapist’s face into a corrugated wall and grumbling about bisexuals. His assertion that he’d “convert” Hyuma if only the lad weren’t his brother, while wrong on many levels, is an unexpected moment of jaw-dropping bad taste humour in Tsujimoto’s otherwise po-faced script. Elsewhere, however, there’s a tang of homophobia that never quite goes away.

Although Ikku’s physicality is never in question – he almost defeats Milly in a manner no-one in episode one even came to close to – the film lacks the sheer arbitrary threat that the Jack Brothers brought first time round. This is absence is compensated for, though, by the ambiguous allegiances of Hura. Pretty much the only person in the whole farrago to get a character arc, Tsujimoto seems to be setting her up for a meaty role in the next instalment. (Though having said that, ‘Bloody Battle’ ends, unlike its predecessor, without a post-credits pointer to the next chapter.)

The downside of backstory, character arcs and other such subtleties is, of course, that ‘Bloody Battle’ is a slower, talkier affair. During the early scenes in which Milly wrestles with the decision to assist Hura or not, there are so many pregnant pauses that I wondered if a few pages of Harold Pinter hadn’t got mixed up with the shooting script. Maybe it’s a harsh comparison, given that the original is essentially a short rather than an actual feature, but the fact that, at just under an hour and a quarter, ‘Bloody Battle’ feels somewhat padded has to be counted as a flaw. It doesn’t help that while Tsujimoto’s cast look cool, none of them quite have the acting chops to carry to the non-smackdown business.

I can’t help thinking that if you took both Milly films, chopped about fifteen minutes out, and edited them into a single feature, you’d have something that equaled the sum of its parts.

*Again, a combination of unsubtitled end credits and sketchy IMDb information leaves me with no performers’ names beyond those of the leading ladies.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hard Revenge Milly

A note on the title: both IMDb and the subtitles on the print I watched have it as ‘Hard Revenge, Milly’; likewise the indigenous title (‘Hâdo ribenji, Mirî’) retains the comma. Which makes it sound like a comment, addressed to the eponymous Milly, regarding the nature of hard revenge. Rendering it, however, as ‘Hard Revenge Milly’ attributes the vengeful business to the protagonist – which makes a lot more sense to me. After all, you wouldn’t refer to Big Bad John as “Big Bad, John”, would you?

So: ‘Hard Revenge Milly’. At just 44 minutes (or 38 if you skip the credits, which I wouldn’t advise as there’s a Marvel-stylee post-credits coda which pretty much sets up the sequel), writer/director Takanori Tsujimoto’s gleefully excessive feature sometimes feels like a fleshed-out showreel and sometimes like the second half of a feature twice the length.

Here’s the plot: Milly (Miki Mizuno) reminisces, while driving to a run-down bar, about the weekend drives she took with her family two years ago. There’s a flash-forward where she cuts a guy in half with a sword and she muses that things are different now. The girl has a talent for understatement! At the bar, Milly speaks with former sword-maker Jubei* (shades of ‘Kill Bill Vol 1’ here) and gets kitted out.

Then she visits the gentleman we met in the flash-forward. We don’t get to make his acquaintance for much longer this time around.

Turns out he’s part of a gang, led by the loathsome Jack Brothers (insert ~ off, ~ shit, or I’m all right ~ fuck you gag here), responsible for murdering Milly’s family. (Flashbacks provide the gory details. And I do mean gory. There’s even a moment of baby conflagration that, notwithstanding the venal filth I’ve waded through during two years of Winter of Discontent, comes across as just a tad unnecessary.) Milly snaps a pic of the dismembered corpse, sends it to the Jack Brothers, waits for their arrival and protracted gunplay, swordplay, hand-to-hand combat and improper use of a teddy bear ensues.

Seriously: keep an eye on that teddy bear.

As a revenge thriller, ‘Hard Revenge Milly’ contains absolutely nothing it doesn’t need to. Even the motive behind the Jack Brothers’ attack on Milly’s family is immaterial (“they were just there when we wanted to kill someone”). There’s almost a purity to it: someone gets fucked over; they dole out a brutal fucking over in return. Job done. End of.

While considerably less silly than, say, ‘Machine Girl’ (Tsujimoto maintains, for the most part, a grimy, punkish aesthetic and makes good use of some post-industrial locations), it’s still as OTT in the blood-letting department and boasts some slapstick (if grotesque) moments, such as Milly impaling a corpse through the head to make him sit up, and one of the Jack Brothers taking a pratfall as he trips over a severed head. Or the perplexed manner in which a gang boss examines the conflagrant remains of a henchman.

The payoff to all this viscera requires an effect that is obviously beyond the production’s budget, hence its depiction as a piece of shadow-play. However, this last-minute revelation of Milly’s capabilities is less likely to leave you in a state of open-mouthed OMG-ness than make you wonder why she didn’t use it earlier and save herself a lot of pain during the climatic smackdown. Speaking of which, the over-foleyed thwack sounds do very little to disguise the fact that the combatants’ fists and bodies are demonstrably several feet apart during much of the shoddily edited hand-to-hand.

But this kind of thing exists in its own filmic universe and serves purely as a delivery system for tough chick iconography and massive gouts of blood. Mizuno fits the bill and then some as regards the former (in fact she’s second only to Christina Lindberg in ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’ when it comes to looking kick-ass and full-on vengeful in a floor length leather coat) and the amount of times gouts of blood spatter the camera lens is a testament to the latter.

Right, then. Off to watch the sequel!

*Apart from the leading lady, don’t ask me for any of the cast’s names. The closing credits were in Japanese and IMDb doesn’t marry up the actors to their characters.