by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $13.60
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Cole Sprouse, Kiko Mizuhara, Nijiro Murakami
Intro:
… more successful as an exuberant exercise in genre pastiche than as a story that leaves a lasting emotional impression.
Eugene Kotlyarenko, the Ukrainian-American filmmaker behind Spree, returns with Vintage Violence, a genre-bending crime caper that begins as a flirtatious online adventure before spiralling into a blood-soaked parody of Japanese gangster cinema. Blending romantic comedy, action thriller and horror, the film is an exercise in deliberate excess, driven by a restless digital aesthetic and an increasingly absurd plot.
The story opens with a livestream by Carter (Cole Sprouse), an American urban explorer who discovers a cache of vintage Levi’s jeans in an abandoned mine in Colorado. Among his online followers is Izumi (Kiko Mizuhara, who is also the producer of the film), watching from Japan. Recognising the potential value of his find, she urges him to bring the denim to Tokyo, where it could fetch a fortune. Their exchanges soon develop into a flirtation, convincing Carter that the trip might offer more than a lucrative business opportunity. Unaware that Izumi and her boyfriend, Hiro (Nijiro Murakami), intend to steal the jeans and sell them to a denim-obsessed yakuza boss, Carter arrives in Japan carrying a bag full of trouble.
What begins as a charmingly dubious romantic adventure soon goes spectacularly off the rails. Once the yakuza enter the picture, the film erupts into a succession of severed fingers, slit throats and grotesque acts of violence, transforming its lighthearted premise into a cartoonishly gory crime saga. Kotlyarenko is less interested in observing the conventions of these genres than in gleefully dismantling them. The romantic comedy largely plays its familiar notes straight, while the gangster narrative becomes an increasingly outrageous send-up of Japanese exploitation cinema.
Sprouse, handsome and blond, brings an almost boyish innocence to Carter, whose American-flag sweater makes his cultural identity impossible to miss. Mizuhara, meanwhile, gives Izumi an alluring mixture of sophistication and mischievousness, appearing in a succession of stylish, kawaii-inspired outfits. Their chemistry provides the film with its romantic backbone, and their relationship unfolds through digital courtship, mutual deception and a recognisable push-and-pull of attraction. The eventual kiss feels less like a narrative revelation than the inevitable destination of a familiar romantic formula. Still, the contrast between their tentative love story and the surrounding carnage gives the film some of its most entertaining moments.
Kotlyarenko’s most distinctive choice is to tell much of this story through the visual language of contemporary digital life. Vertical smartphone footage, livestreams, instant messages, video calls and split screens are woven into the conventional cinematic image. Desktop cinema and screen-based storytelling are hardly new, but here the technique lends the narrative immediacy and momentum, capturing the fragmented attention of a generation accustomed to watching several things at once. The constant flow of notifications and competing images can be exhausting, yet that overstimulation is also part of the film’s design. Sean Price Williams, whose work on The Sweet East is marked by a distinctive visual sensibility, is almost unrecognisable here: his cinematography serves a glossy, neon-drenched spectacle worlds away from his usual aesthetic.
The other major attraction is the film’s gleefully superficial vision of Japan’s criminal underworld. Neon-lit streets, eccentric gangsters and fetishised vintage denim create a heightened, almost comic-book landscape in which violence becomes another form of spectacle. The yakuza characters are less psychologically convincing individuals than exaggerated genre figures, and the film rarely ventures beyond the surface of the world it evokes. Its Japanese setting sometimes feels closer to a collection of familiar cinematic signifiers than to a fully realised place.
Ultimately, Vintage Violence delivers precisely what its title promises: violence rendered in a deliberately retro, exploitation-inspired style, filtered through the frantic rhythms of the internet age. Kotlyarenko’s formal experimentation gives the film energy, while its combination of romance, absurdity and gore ensures that it rarely becomes dull. Yet the visual inventiveness cannot entirely compensate for the thin characterisation and increasingly convoluted plotting. There is a playful, occasionally endearing film beneath all the blood and digital noise, but it struggles to emerge from the spectacle surrounding it. Vintage Violence is more successful as an exuberant exercise in genre pastiche than as a story that leaves a lasting emotional impression.
