Have you ever watched a “John Wick” movie and thought to yourself, “I wonder if this would be even better if it were a little more lurid, a hell of a lot dumber, and its soundtrack had roughly 9,000 times as much flash-microwaved cheese rock?” Let’s just assume you have. Well, good news! Netflix — whose original content often feels like a response to a rhetorical question no human being has ever thought to ask — has you covered and then some with “Demon City,” a fun Japanese action film that adds exactly nothing to the “retired hitman seeks revenge” sub-genre and has a decent time doing it.
Aggressively pared down from Masamichi Kawabe’s sprawling manga series “Onigoroshi” (which spans more than 150 chapters and counting), Seiji Tanaka’s adaptation ditches the supernatural overtones of its source material in order to pursue a lean — and very mean — tale of yakuza requital. “Honey & Clover” actor Toma Ikuta stars as Sakata, the deadliest assassin in all of Shinjo City, and “Demon City” makes good on that reputation over the course of a prologue that highlights the cleverness of the film’s hyper-violence. Sakata’s one-man siege on a yakuza safehouse isn’t anything you haven’t seen before, but the sequence is littered with devious little moments of visual ingenuity that demand your attention (e.g., an audiovisual gag that rhymes a decapitation with a gushing lawn sprinkler).
This massacre, of course, was supposed to be Sakata’s “one last job” before he put his snub-nosed meat cleaver away for good and settled into his life as the most loving dad; we even see him stand in a shower and watch the water bead down his scars in slow-motion, the universal sign for “I’m putting my past life behind me.” Alas, the local crime syndicate has other plans, and Sakata barely has time to change into his sweatpants before his home is invaded by some ruthless gangsters wearing scary demon masks. The bad guys seem to think that Sakata is the so-called “Demon of Shinjo City,” a local myth who supposedly rises from his grave every 50 years in order to go on an unstoppable killing spree. They want to nip that in the bud as some kind of public service. For reasons that still aren’t entirely clear by the end of the movie, the Kimen-gumi are instructed to leave Sakata alive after they fire a bullet into his head. The hitman’s wife and their young daughter aren’t shown the same mercy.
Surely the decision to leave the “Demon of Shinjo City” in a vegetative state won’t come back to haunt the yakuza at a critical moment in the future! Cut to: 12 years later, when the comically evil mayor of Shinjo (Matsuya Onoe as Sunohara) is about to unveil a multi-billion-dollar entertainment facility that includes Japan’s first proper casino. As if recognizing what an inconvenient time it would be for Sakata to snap out of his coma and start murdering the people whose blood money paid for Sunohara’s monument of corruption, the gangsters show up at Sakata’s hospital room to finish what they started. Needless to say, killing the guy proves a little bit more difficult than just pulling the plug.
The scuffle that ensues finds “Demon City” at its scrappy and blood-soaked best, as a dazed Ikuta flops around the hospital floor while repurposing his IV tube into a deadly weapon. A few shots of dodgy CGI aren’t enough to diminish the chaotic charm of this mini-spectacle, which finds Tanaka flexing his muscles as an excellent director of close-up combat. Always violent and often a touch seedier than you might expect from something with the typical Netflix sheen, the film takes real pleasure in the savage cruelty of its characters. And while that’s obviously reflected in the fight scenes (which are too good to be so few in number), it also bleeds into the otherwise generic story bits that pad out the movie between them. No supporting character is safe from the Kimen-gumi’s reach, and even Sakata is happy to eliminate his old friends without a second thought — which is just as well in a film whose plot would have all the shape and staying power of loose sawdust if not for the brutality that binds it together.
It would be a spoiler to reveal the other respect in which “Demon City” goes out of its way to invoke a certain ickiness, but Tanaka’s adaptation is so threadbare — and so half-committed to its own lore — that nothing its characters are or do can meaningfully complicate the simple fact that they want to kill each other. That the movie pauses in the middle of its climactic brawl to unpack the final boss’ soapy origin story betrays the failed intentions of a project that was hoping to create its own “John Wick”-like mythos, and had to settle for its own “John Wick”-like staircase shootout (which is obviously shot to look like a single take). Hack as it might be to invoke “John Wick” instead of the yakuza classics that “Demon City” cribs from, it’s clear that Netflix wanted to fund a film that had more in common with Chad Stahelski than Kinji Fukasaku.
Then again, hack as it might be to stage another digitally altered stairway oner, even that old trope is somewhat revitalized by the ingenuity on display here, just as the fight scene that follows invites Sakata to weaponize a fire extinguisher — among the most common action movie props — in a way that I’ve never really seen before. It’s enough to make “Demon City” a fine place to spend 100 minutes of your time, but any interest in returning for another stay would depend on Tanaka’s ability to find a way into this story, and not just around it.
Grade: C+
“Demon City” is now streaming on Netflix.
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