One Percenter (2023): Japanese Fall Guy delivers eighty-five minutes of mayhem (Review)

For some people, films about film-making are insufferable exercises in navel-gazing, nothing more than a way for self-absorbed artistes to force us to experience their creative angst. Yet there is a long history of this kind of meta-film within that least pretentious of genres, action. There’s a pretty simple reason why. The problem of fitting as many fights and stunts as possible into a screenplay clears up entirely when your lead character is a stunt performer, or an action star, or anything else in that vein. It also adds an element of self-parody, even self-reflexivity, that can be hard to bring to the genre otherwise. This is presumably what David Leitch is aiming for in his forthcoming big-screen version of The Fall Guy; before that comes out, Third Window have offered us the opportunity to see a Japanese spin on the same concept in Yudai Yamaguchi’s One Percenter.

Also known as One Percent Warrior (which frankly makes it sound like a vigilante film starring David Cameron), it’s the story of Takuma Toshiro, an action star whose career has faltered due to his unbending set of standards. He is first seen in a fake behind-the-scenes documentary (albeit one that includes several very real clips of actor Tak Sakaguchi training), complaining that modern action scenes don’t seem real, that they’re too choreographed, too heavily edited, lacking in respect for what real fighting entails. Given this, it’s anyone’s guess how he gets hired to act in a wirework-heavy samurai film. Unsurprisingly, he hates it, but it spurs him on to dust off an old idea – titled One Percenter – and together with his puppyish assistant Akira he heads out to make the greatest guerilla-shot action movie ever made.

There’s no plot without conflict, and One Percenter sets two big roadblocks in the way of Toshiro’s dream. The first is that the location he and Akira set their hearts on is already being used by a big-budget Chinese co-production. The second is that a mob of one hundred yakuza have descended on the location in order to find a buried stash of cocaine. For most people, the second problem would be the more insurmountable, but for Toshiro it’s the fun one. Having claimed that his fighting style – the astonishingly-named “assassination-jutsu” – is the only real one, he can practice it against an army of goons. And it doesn’t even have to interrupt the filming of the movie – rather, in time-honoured behind-the-scenes comedy fashion, it might end up being the movie.

One of the dangers of opening your film-about-filmmaking with a manifesto like the one Toshiro opens the film with is that it sets down a challenge, not just for other movies but for yours. It has to be said that Yamaguchi’s action directing wouldn’t always meet Toshiro’s rigorous standards. The fight scenes aren’t choppily edited by any means, but they’re not the documentary-style one-takes his lead character dreams of. Yamaguchi saves that for a pair of wilfully absurd trick shots which fly in and out of rooms, up and down stairs, through a gunman’s legs at one point… It’s completely gratuitous but a lot of fun. Similarly, Toshiro spurns drama, claiming action is dramatic enough to carry a film. He’d surely not approve of the sudden romantic connection Yamaguchi adds between two supporting characters, but the reveal was unexpected enough, and the reasoning behind it quirky enough, to make me laugh at its storytelling audacity.

In One Percenter, Toshiro hasn’t directed since his debut ten years ago, called Birth (much fun can be had from pretending he’s talking about Jonathan Glazer’s sophomore feature here). In real life, Tak Sakaguchi has worked consistently since his debut in Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus, though his career weathered a significant scandal a few years back when he apologised for introducing Sion Sono to one of the women who accused him of rape. The Japanese release of this film has been repeatedly delayed as different claims circulate about how culpable Sakaguchi was for the misogynistic culture around his frequent directorial collaborator; whatever the truth, it does seem to have left a mark on his performance, which is unexpectedly solemn, intense and oddly effective. Rather than play up to the rest of the film’s absurdity, he takes Toshiro every bit as seriously as Toshiro takes himself.

The same could not be said for Yamaguchi, a body horror director infamous for Meatball Machine. He’s clearly having a lot of fun making something just as violent but much lighter in tone than his usual fare. There are problems with One Percenter: the villains aren’t that memorable, and the double twist ending is perhaps one twist too many. But mostly it reminds you how much fun action movies can be when they’re free of the baggage Hollywood weighs them down with: no continuity from some older film, no set-ups for a sequel, just eighty-five minutes of mayhem. Extras include a behind-the-scenes featurette and a very excitable commentary from Arne Venema and Mike Leeder, who both have a lot of fun trying to guess which real-life Japanese film-makers inspired the directors Toshiro butts heads with.

Graham’s Archive – One Percenter