When Muto decides to get in the movie business himself, a series of circumstances bring him into contact with the F**k Bombers, and he hires them to film a raid on Ikegami. He’s also looking to secure a movie career for wayward daughter Michiko (Fumi Nikaido), who starred in a popular toothpaste commercial as a child and recently walked off the set of a big production. Meanwhile, yakuza boss Muto (Jun Kuniura) is looking for revenge against rival Ikegami (Shinichi Tsutsumi), whose attempt on his life a decade earlier earned his wife a prison sentence for taking out the assassins. The crew watches footage from their uncompleted movie in a shuttered movie house that bustled when they were kids not on the big screen, but on a small TV sitting on the stage below it. One nice touch from Sono is correlating the stagnation of the F**k Bombers with the change from 35mm to digital film. Their techniques haven’t evolved, they’re expert procrastinators, and their action “star” still walks around in the yellow and black tracksuit worn by Bruce Lee in Game of Death (or Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, if you prefer). Ten years after we first meet the crew, led by director Hirata (Hiroki Hasegawa), the film world – and the world in general – has left them behind. However, there’s a bit too much gear grinding for Hell to be the consistently engrossing, cheerful high-octane ride it could’ve been.Īs young teens, a group of passionate guerrilla filmmakers calling themselves the F**k Bombers had designs of making masterpieces. It is commendable that the chaos of a yakuza revenge tale is blended quite seamlessly, and inventively, with a story of young filmmakers in a way that’s tough to describe but which is perfectly coherent in the moment. There’s plenty of cleverness - and brutality - splashed throughout, but the mayhem and merriment are undercut by long stretches of tedium. For this particular tale, it would have been beneficial if Sono had used some shorthand. Prolific director Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell? sporadically feels like a heartfelt love letter to the cinema and filmmaking – one that’s inked in blood.
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