Being directed by Gakuryu/Sogo Ishii whose filmography since the 2000s never really lived up to his earlier work, i didn't expect much of yet another corporate mainstream product with "punk" in its title. Says a lot that it still managed to leave me disappointed.

In a nutshell, this is pretty much your average random-content-generator type of low-brow japanese comedy, the kind that's been a dime a dozen since, well... the late seventies, early eighties i'd actually say. But worse, it's one with blockbuster production values - talking human-sized CGI monkeys and all.

Two-thirds in the film then decides it doesn't wanna be a wacky comedy anymore. No, now we wanna be an epic action fantasy movie and even shoehorn in some greek tragedy in the finale, another sudden shift in tone and an emotional outburst that comes off as simply undeserved after the weak character development leading up to it.

Adding insult to injury and conforming to every last tired cliché possible, they go as far as having "Anarchy in the UK" playing over the end credits. Yeah, they had to i guess, since this has "punk" in the title and this shitty old boygroup is everything a creatively bankrupt board of dull studio executives can think of when they hear the word. This made me so fucking sad...

Punk Samurai Slash Down just confirms my assessment that following a huge creative outburst from the early 90s to mid-2000s, there is little exciting going on in japanese cinema now outside of the low-budget and independent sectors and that great directors of previous decades either aren't given the opportunity or simply aren't interested in creating anything original.

People freak out a lot recently about the prospect of films (and music, books, journalism...) being written by AI. To me, it feels like much of that shit has either been written by machines or humans behaving like machines for a long time now and actual machines joining the game can't make things any worse really.