In the Flesh: First Love (Patreon)

First Love is like if Snatch had a tender little love story in the middle of its high-speed blender of colliding criminal mishaps. It also has the advantage of being written and directed by longtime jack of all trades Takashi Miike rather than cardboard tough guy aficionado Guy Ritchie. The chemistry between apathetic young boxer Leo (Masataka Kubota), who learns early on he may not have long to live, and drug-addled abuse survivor Yuri (Sakurako Konishi) is strong but underplayed, their connection kept low-key and sometimes swallowed up by the melee of overlapping revenge stories and drug-running plots in which they find themselves embroiled.

The film’s other natural point of comparison is Miike’s own Audition, which begins as something of a romance before opening up to reveal its gory innards. First Love is similarly playful, but more focused on humor than insight or interrogation. It’s diffuse plot leaves less room for any individual character to take shape, and while berserk boyfriend avenger Julie (Becky) and fair and square but bloodthirsty Yakuza boss Gondō (Seiyo Uchino) are fun to watch in action, there isn’t much going on here that Miike hasn’t done better elsewhere.

Visually, First Love has a lot going for it. Miike’s typical grimy apartments and gilded dives are beautiful here, and the action scenes are shot and cut with typical craftsmanship so that the violence never becomes tiresome or difficult to parse. Koji Endo’s soundtrack is good, solid fun, oscillating between energetic sax and slasher strings depending on who’s getting killed and in what way it’s happening, and a surprising animated sequence near the film’s end (added in post-production to circumvent a highly conservative studio approach to risky stunts) more than compensates for a few scattered VFX shortfalls. First Love knows what it is and hits all the markers with a wink.