Prisoner #206 (in a clear
homage/ripoff of the Female Prisoner 701:
Scorpion series), the titular Maria (Noriko Aota), is employed by her
warden to take out bad guys. Meanwhile,
an insane doctor gets involved with Taiwanese gangsters in a scheme to control
the minds of people for fun and profit.
Who will Maria’s next target(s) be?
Yes, Shuji Kataoka’s Prisoner Maria: The Movie follows in the
footsteps of Toei’s fantastic, Meiko-Kaji-starring franchise. It also owes tons to the films of John Woo
(and just about every action film director to come out of Hong Kong), Luc
Besson’s Nikita, the Pinky Violence
and Women with Guns genres, and comic books in general. Given its title, I don’t know if it is an
adaptation (I could find nothing regarding this information, but then my
fluency in Japanese is crap), however two manga writers worked on it (Keiji
Nakazawa and Shigeru Tsuchiyama). The
problem is that this film takes all of these elements, regurgitates them across
the screen, but adds nothing of its own.
It can be argued that its more bizarre elements are what distinguish it,
and that’s a fair statement. Yet, the
film is so disjointed, wanting to be so stridently unoriginal, that it becomes
little more than a pile of hand-me-down clothes, more disappointing to sift
through for its sameness than any gems that may hopefully be hidden at the
bottom (one can only own so many “vintage” Hawaiian shirts or whatever; this
point is, of course, up for debate). The
first scene has Maria pulling a hit on a gangster which involves a nice
throat-slashing, a great many bullets, and camera angles that make you want to
stand on your head. Maria sequesters
herself in her concrete apartment when she’s not sequestered in her concrete cell. She has a mini-arsenal under her bed that she
seems to be proficient in, although in practice she’s not nearly as smooth as
we expect her to be. She meets a cop,
Igarasi (Tetsuo Kurata), with whom she naturally falls in love, despite their
being at cross purposes. And so on, and
so on. If this is an adaptation of a
manga or a novel, it’s less like a side by side comparison than like staring at
a stack of pages which may or may not be in order, but the result would be the
same.
Prisoner Maria is an absolute sleazefest, but rarely to any effect
other than being skanky. For example, a
young serial killer ties up a woman in his home operating theater. He cuts her clothes off with a large hunting
knife. He runs the blade across her
breasts and crotch. He sucks on her
nipple for a second. Then he slices her
torso open, and we get to watch the life fade from her eyes. Fair enough.
This scene works in setting up the level of evil Maria must oppose. Compare it with the scene where the Taiwanese
gangster kidnaps a brother and sister.
Before taking them away, he has his men haul out some anonymous
Taiwanese woman, and the baddies double team her in front of everyone. Why?
The victims already know what’s in store for them. This is sleaze for the sake of sleaze. I guess there’s a place for that, but as I
was watching the film, the word “gratuitous” kept flashing across my mind. To me, then, it’s more distraction than
necessity, either as genre or narrative requirement. After all, formless pornography is readily
available elsewhere, even back in the 90s when this was made. Surprisingly, Aota’s sex scene is
chaste. Considering the film it’s
surrounded by, this sticks out like a sore thumb. Perhaps its modesty is meant to highlight
some emotional involvement between the two characters. Unfortunately, their chemistry is more like a
sparkler than a roman candle.
Male power trip and rape
fantasies clearly make up the film’s raison d’etre. Maria’s warden plays like the Niles Caulder
of the story. He emotionlessly flings
Maria into situations with little-to-no information. He withholds and/or just doesn’t update his
operative with new data that would facilitate her work and reduce the risk
level to himself. He coerces Maria’s
participation by keeping her from her son (who doesn’t seem to miss his mother
at all, when we do get to see him). In
other words, the warden is a dick who can’t even bring himself to work in his
own self-interest. The other men in the
film who are not Igarasi exercise control over women, by will or by force. Women are meat to them, and their white
slavery/prostitution/mind control racket confirms this. There are very few women in this movie who
aren’t bound, gagged, or drugged at some point or another. Dr. Kito’s mind control experiments are the
ultimate display of this desire to erase women’s minds and keep their bodies as
literal receptacles for sex. He believes
himself to be God (that’s not an analogy), forming and casting off people as it
pleases him.
Despite the surface differences
between the bad guys and Igarasi, he is just as much of a male power fantasy, simply
tilted toward the more benevolent end of the spectrum. He’s clearly smarter than Maria (but the way
she’s written, just about everyone is), since he effortlessly follows her trail
and tracks her down. Worse than that,
for as talented as Maria is supposed to be, and for as good as Aota looks all
kitted out in her leather hitwoman outfit, she’s given very little opportunity
to kick some male chauvinist/misogynist ass.
She gets thrown around and has the tables turned on her almost
constantly, her victories occurring more by accident than skill and planning. To that point, Igarasi shows up more than
once in the nick of time to save her bacon, robbing her of any true sense of
empowerment, and it’s only through his largesse that she escapes in the
end. Like every other woman in the film,
Maria is just another object to be used.
Prisoner Maria: The Movie
thwarts every moment for its protagonist to shine until one begins to wonder
why she’s the protagonist at all?
Possibly because she’s not meant to have agency in this world, a
powerless cog that thinks she’s the motor driving her life? Her disenfranchisement and oppression are
inescapable. She’s serving a life
sentence as a prisoner in more ways than one.
I’d like to believe that this is what the filmmakers were going for, as
it would bestow the film with a darkly cynical outlook on the unchanged place
of women in a male dominated society, given the illusion of power and hope to
keep them in their place. But from the
evidence of the film’s construction and prurient attitude, I tend to think the
people behind this just didn’t care about the film and its characters. So, neither did I.
MVT: Aota shows some talent,
and she has the potential to carry an action film. She just doesn’t get her shot to do so here.
Make or Break: The first
female victim’s torture and death is about as blatant a sign post for what this
film is as you can get, for better or worse.
Score: 5/10
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