TLDR; 3/5 stars.

I'm not sure where to begin because honestly the movie is a mess. If it wasn't for the character of Kakihara (the guy on the posters with his mouth sliced open) I would've gone to bed halfway through instead of staying up to finish it. Its a good bit of acting especially because the character himself is pretty 1 dimensional. His wardrobe is pretty snazzy too.

The movie starts off well for the first 30mins but then it just starts falling apart and you can almost see the writer trying to piece it back together by stuffing the movie full of half baked ideas and sub plots that are never fully fleshed out or realized.

I read some other reviews afterwards to try and make sense of some of it... and the most useful one suggested you needed to know a bit about Buddhism to really understand some of the material. OK fair enough, maybe there is something in those texts about ejaculating on a potted plant that went right over my head.

There is some lampooning of the genre going on during the film too, which I found a little humorous.

So what about all the violence and gore and rape? Well its there and continues through the entire film. If you've ever sat through SAW, Hostile, or the like most of it isn't going to push your shock buttons. But before that I've got to talk about Ichi himself.

[spoilers]
In a nutshell Ichi is an autistic crybaby that can only cum if he's watching someone get raped or if he's killing someone himself, though throughout the middle of the movie theres a period where he is unable to orgasm, but that gets cleared up after he has an epiphany and concludes that "no" means "yes".

I didn't care for the character at all. That said it does appear to be the basis for why there are two types of violence in this movie.

Firstly there are the scenes where Ichi isn't present, or isn't taking part in the violence. These are definitely the more graphic scenes of the film and if you were ever going to pull away or cringe it would be during these.

When Ichi is doing the killing though thats when it changes to the almost comical, over the top, live action anime style of violence. A man child in a Power Ranger outfit, armed only with 2" razor blades on the heels of his shoes, walks into a room with a dozen Yakuza and gives the room a "frog in blender" make over. All that plays into his man child persona... there are two scenes were he's at home playing Tekken 3 or something and his handler always tells him he needs to bring justice to the bullies.

Anyway theres other stuff thats borderline pointless, that I didn't get or care for... but luckily Kakihara manages to be interesting enough on his own that I still wanted to see how things were going to turn out for him in the end.

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Righteousness will always be the trap at the gates of hell