Tetsuo: The Bullet Man

Plays out like a late 90's industrial metal music video stretched out to an hour and a half with really bad acting, and seemingly written and directed by someone with a poor grasp of the English language. We'll see if I ever get around to watching the first two after catching a whiff of this turd.

While it features the same hyperkinetic and extreme style of the first two films, it's polished to an uncomfortable sheen that robs it of a lot of the low-budget, marginal irreverence that make the original feel so daring. Plus it's in English for some weird reason, which makes the dialogue feel really on-the-nose. However, even a weaker Tetsuo film is still way wilder than just about anything out there, so it's not a bad time; it's just not strictly necessary if you've seen the first two.

While the original Tetsuo film used scrambled, hallucinatory, kinetic imagery to tell its story, The Bullet Man uses long scenes of dialog-based exposition. Instead of being forced to piece the tangled plot together in our mind, it's explained to us by line after line of poorly written dialog. The result is a boring, watered down version of a really neat experimental film.

This is pretty much the same as the 2nd one, but it's in english, they overexplain the plot, and all of the cool bad guy metal men from 2 are replaced by...Shin'ya Tsukamoto in a t shirt with a piece of paper with an x on his chest and some boxer-briefs. The Final Form is actually pretty rad, but these films get exponentially worse and worse as they go on. The acting in this one is godawful and after 2 of these Shin'ya's quirks and editing are nothing short of obnoxious.

The revelatory background context attempts to quench a kind of itch to comprehend Tsukamoto's biopunk mythos, but lacks the bizarre occult and pipe dream revulsion of the original. And while the machine gun (literally) editing often works to great visceral effect, it also tends to obscure its unique amoebas of special effects, production design and any chance of narrative lucidity.

Tsukamoto Shinya can do much better than this. Where the material once begged for a frighteningly sexual and personal rabbit hole mindfuck, here it is spelled out with surprisingly poor dialogue, bizarre spoken English and a hamfisted Akira / Body Hammer industrial espionage plot, amounting to nothing more than a V cinema sequel hackjob.

I was really confused which was worse the second or this one. The effects were freshly different and there was clearly more money to produce it. But this time there was more spoken lines and they really annoyed since they were very poorly written. This version was also the first one where they used English language instead of Japanese.

Tsukamato's long awaited followup both satisfies and dissapoints. On a visual level this film succeeds in reinterpreting the previous film's experimental style, but the overall narrative is lacking. Bullet Man could almost be described as Tsukamato revisiting the plot concepts he introducing in Body Hammer, but there seems little reason as to why since nothing new is introduced. T3 provides more industrial madness which is great, but there's little innovation.