directed by Yudai Yamaguchi
Japan
99 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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Deadball offers us no explanation for the fact that our (anti)hero is possessed of preternatural baseball skills. It simply opens with the incident that decides his fate: him smoking Mickey Curtis in the nog with a baseball so hard he explodes. This happens when he is about 16, and next we see him he's a full-grown (well, sort of) juvenile delinquent - the worst in the country, wanted on "54 charges, including Dropping Televisions On People". He is finally arrested and brought to the harshest possible prison, where he's offered a deal: his freedom and the freedom of all the other inmates if they, banding together as a baseball team, can defeat the rival team from the all-girl Saint Black Dahlia high school. Of course, this was never a fair shake for the boys' side: the warden simply wants to get rid of them, and knows the opposing team will annihilate them.
The film's sense of humor is so offensive that it becomes almost banal. While I don't think Nazi imagery is something that should be trotted out simply for its aesthetic value, that is a relatively common practice in certain niches of Japanese cinema, and the pure aesthetic is so divorced from any actual ideological practices associated with it that it's hard to really feel anything after you've seen it a few times. Ditto everything else that happens here: so purely for shock value without any actual attempt at being mean about it that I almost don't care. Almost. The movie's weird homophobia is its only stance that feels like it has fangs, but again, when you know beforehand that the movie you're about to watch it as bizarre and offensive as Deadball, it's hard to feel surprised.
With a movie like this, a lot depends on the actors' individual skills. It won't work if every single person acts like they're in the world's most bugnuts film. There should, ideally, be a few people who take themselves just seriously enough that it highlights how outlandish everything else is. Tak Sakaguchi pulls off the Yakyu role really well, playing it not quite fully straight but with all the stoicism and bravado that a delinquent hero protagonist should have. (He also played a Xillien in Godzilla Final Wars.) Other people who felt like they brought exactly as much sauce to their roles as was necessary were Miho Ninagawa as the warden and Mari Hoshino as Shinosuke, Yakyu's 16-year-old cellmate and the only truly sympathetic character in the film.
There is also, I suppose, technically, in some way, a plot. It doesn't really develop until the second half to final quarter of the film, but we occasionally get nuggets of information that hint at the storied past of Yakyu and his brother Musashi (yeah, those are their names). After the accidental death of their father, Yakyu becomes a delinquent while Musashi is forced to turn to much more unpleasant means of making profit until he finally snaps and commits murder, and after that is never seen again, the mystery of his unknown fate being a thorn in the side of our hero. (He shows back up at the end in a truly spectacular way which I will not mention in detail due to it being a spoiler.) Like I said, Sakaguchi carries this off with enough seriousness that you can get invested in it - all insanity all the time would have made this thing unwatchable.
Did I like this? I don't know. It happened, that's all I can say about it. I really liked the running gag where Yakyu could reach out of frame and grab a lit cigarette to smoke for dramatic effect at any given time. Other characters react to this, which makes it even funnier. If you like splatterpunk films, there's some pretty good gore in this, and there's a scene where a character gets punched through a telephone, so if that kind of thing sounds like something you'd be willing to sit through a lot of visually offensive jokes about basically everybody and everything for, go for it.
