Sukiyaki Western Django                                     
Dir Takashi Miike, Japan 2007                                   
Contender Home Entertainment, £15.99                    
7/10                                                                        

The Good, The Bad, The Weird
Dir Ji-Woon Kim, S Korea 2008
On UK release from 6 February
9/10

While the release of two oriental westerns in consecutive years might be a startling coincidence, the genre-bending is, in itself, perhaps not as surprising as it might initially appear – the spaghetti western was, after all, a curiously international hybrid, with its Kurosawa influences, Italian direct­ors, Spanish crew and smatt­ering of American actors. But while Takashi Miike and Ji-woon Kim might have shared the same starting point, they have ended up with two very different films. Miike, who tellingly casts Quentin Tarantino in a cameo, has produced a movie whose chief subject is its own lineage; Kim selects a few plot points and genre conventions to launch an unselfconscious, rip-roaring crowd-pleaser, playing his references for ironic humour.

Miike’s film – narratively and stylistically – is explicitly about the cyclical nature of things, right from its opening scene: in front of a painted backdrop, a snake eats an egg, is snatched up by a hawk, which is shot by Tarantino, who cuts out the blood-covered egg and, in a Japanese accent, uses it to illustrate an old tale of a battle between red Heike and white Genji clans: “The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things…”

Action flashes forward to a lone gunman, arriving in a town para­lysed by a Heike-Genji standoff; he is drawn to a young half-Heike, half-Genji boy who tends a hybrid red and white rose. Aided by the boy’s grandmother, a gunslinging wreaker of vengeance herself, he precipitates a final showdown between the two sides.

At first, his film is irrit­ating. The Japanese actors speak in heavily-accented and often indecipherable English; the central character is utterly overshadowed by the grandmother and gang leaders (the commanding Yoshitsune, leader of the whites, and head of the reds Kiyomori, who styles himself on Shakespeare’s Henry VI, wears the Man With No Name’s steel vest and steals a Gatling gun from Django’s coffin), so that you never root for him; and the actors’ posturing seems matched only by the direct­orial showing off. In fact, with its emot­ional emptiness, fantastical cost­umes and exquisite cinemato­graphy, Sukiyaki Western Django feels like an animated fashion spread from a style mag which has decided punk cowboy is ‘in’ this season.

But it grows on you. The dialogue becomes not something you strain to understand but part of the impressionistic æsthetic; the lack of dramatic tension and believable characters becomes irrelevant beside the surreal artifice and super-stylised violence – perhaps a logical extrapolation of the genre, both silly parody and cool homage.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird is also fantastic to look at, but here bold colour and dramatic sets underpin visceral spectacle, as Sergio Leone’s atmosphere of brooding menace is discarded in favour of frenetic, madcap, big-budget action absurdity. Set in 1930s Manchuria, the three titular characters are Koreans whose paths become intertwined in the hunt for an ancient map. The ‘plot’ provides for a train hold-up, a Thieves Market shoot-out and a chase scene in the desert featuring two bandit gangs, the Japanese army and a sidecar. The ambitious set pieces are held together by great performances from the leads, parti­cularly a seemingly buffoonish petty thief, who provides much of the film’s humour – as when he discovers that an old-fashioned diving suit provides effective, if unwieldy, protection from bullets – and a dark-suited, dark-souled bandit chief; ‘the Good’ is a slighter character, and doesn’t exactly have the gravitas of Blondie. The movie is only let down by the trio’s final standoff, which lacks the tension of the original, and is rather an anti-climax after the rest of the film’s breathless headlong rush; the subtitles’ lapse into a southern drawl adds some Sukiyaki Western Django-style incongruity.