We follow a film crew who dream of making their first feature movie. It will take many years before they get the chance. But when they first get the chance, they will swim in blood.
With this movie, director Sion Sono has made an energetic and funny movie that offers a lot of madness. It’s a bit hard to describe the plot. We follow several groups of people and they all have one thing in common, and that’s making a movie. But if someone dies, then they are dead in reality. And many people will die!
We also have a beautiful woman in one of the leading roles, and she’s one of the hottest women I’ve seen in many years. Fumi Nikaidô is so hot in this movie! I feel like a pedophile pig saying it. She’s so hot!
But then we have a usual problem when director Sion Sono makes a movie. And that’s the long runtime. He loves to make long movies. That means an uneven pace and too much dialogue. It also happens in this movie. The runtime could have been trimmed down 25 minutes without hurting the movie.
Most of the characters are eccentric. These aren’t characters you care about. But it’s interesting to follow some of them when they are so strange and twisted.
What the movie is building up to is a big showdown between two yakuza clans. And the showdown doesn’t disappoint at all. We get to see a long sequence with humor, lots of blood, and dead bodies. The showdown is so crazy. I love it! Especially when the camera crew takes completely off. I love the humor and the energy in this long sequence. This is just insane!
But the movie is too long, and several scenes ruin the flow. Sion Sono is a director who has some good ideas, but he rarely has so many to fill up an entire movie like Takashi Miike has when he’s in his ace. Sion Sono kills a lot of the movie experience with his uneven pace and several boring and empty characters. And it’s never fun with too much overacting and dialogue that’s not interesting to listen to. Much of the dialogue in this movie is terrible. They talk too much, and most of the words that come out of the character’s mouths are not interesting to listen to.
Sion Sono has some good ideas, but he also shows his weak side. I hate when he writes flat dialogue and he allows the terrible overacting. I’ve never been his biggest fan. He has always been for me the shadow of Takashi Miike, nothing more than that. One can almost call him Japan’s answer to Rob Zombie. Just look at the characters he creates.
With Why don’t You Play in Hell, director Sion Sono has made a tribute to movies. Just like Martin Scorsese did with Hugo. But Hugo was a family-friendly movie, and Why don’t You Play in Hell is mostly aimed at movie geeks who appreciate creativity and not just generic movies that lack identity. You will see the positive and negative sides of Sion Sono in this movie.