Last night, I re-watched this early 90’s B-actioner, and couldn’t help but notice how easily it qualifies as a piece of queer cinema, given that its homoerotic ‘undertones’ aren’t ‘under’ at all. Right from the get-go, i.e. the opening credits that feature a muscular, tattooed male torso soaked in and caressed by deep shadows, to the finale that sees Dolph Lundgren and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa engaged in a sword fight (check the urban dictionary) during a colorful parade, the screenplay slips out of the closet too often to be deemed a series of mere coincidences.
Our beefcake hero – a Japanophile with a grudge against a yakuza boss – wears a leather jacket that, albeit not as tight as those popularized in gay subculture, evokes Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, not to mention that he has a tendency to tear off the baddies’ shirts... in order to check on their markings. And then, he is partnered by a half-Japanese portrayed by the late Brandon Lee, with their initial bickering growing into a bromance crowned by the following line, quoted word to word: “Just in case we get killed, I wanted to tell you – you have the biggest dick I’ve ever seen on a man.” Prior to this instance of flattery, he’s kind of jealous of Tia Carrere whose body double ends in his colleague’s bed, while he has to sleep next door, and later on, there’s another discussion about a fixation on genitalia. Speaking of Carrere, her chemistry with the Swedish buff is not nearly as sparkling as the one between him and Lee.
At one point, the buddy cop duo pays a visit to a bathhouse where they face a gang of yakuza wearing nothing but ‘fundoshi’, their female escort disappearing before the clash, and out of nowhere, one of the antagonists grabs a hose and sprays a beam of water all over Lundgren’s character, Kenner (another allusion to Anger?), who later uses the very same tool to dispose of a sumo-sized cannon-fodder, by sticking it into his mouth. I don’t think that any explanation is needed here... When captured and exposed to electroshock torture akin to the so-called ‘conversion therapy’, the protagonists look as if they wandered off a Bob Mizer photoshoot session, with Lundgren barely dressed, in black boxers and matching boots, and Lee shirtless in a pair of jeans.
Add to all that a sensual bare buttocks shot (reminiscent of many JCVD exposures), a lot of mandatory gun pointing, neon lights in all the colors of rainbow, and a close-up of a phallic fuel nozzle heavily leaking, and you have yourself one of the queerest action flicks of its time.
No comments:
Post a Comment