New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) – This review needs a lot of qualifiers. For starters, Last of the Wolves, better known as The Blood of Wolves II, is not a standalone movie. Not really. It’s easy enough to follow without having seen the first installment, The Blood of Wolves (2017), but without the context of the first movie, Last of the Wolves can be a real slog.

Secondly, I don’t know much about Japan, especially in regards to the yakuza, at all. I’m not one to shy away from movies I don’t have the cultural context for, but this one especially needs a little more context in order to appeal to a wider audience. This is not a problem with the movie itself – not every movie is for everyone, and that’s good – but more of a heads-up to a potential audience that may find themselves out of their depth. It probably doesn’t help that this is a sequel, but with an alternate title that doesn’t make that obvious.

Third, Last of the Wolves is two and a half hours long. Longer movies do exist, but this is still on the long side. Suffice to say, there was a lot going on.

The general premise is that in 1998, ten years after the events of The Blood of Wolves, a police officer with yakuza ties (Tôri Matsuzaka) has been playing dirty in an effort to get the dangerous gangsters in check. The relative success of his plan is threatened, however, when rival gang leader Uebayashi (Ryôhei Suzuki) is released from prison. Hungry for revenge, Uebayashi leaves a trail of terror everywhere he goes, murdering and disfiguring with chaotic abandon. It’s a long, slow, gruesome movie where tragedy is inevitable, and no one is truly “good.”

The general premise is decent, definitely the sort of movie my grandpa would be into, but it’s a little all over the place in terms of quality. Despite its length, there are still moments where the diegetic narrative is brought to a screeching halt for a narrator to come in and dump exposition. The first time it happens is understandable, being placed early enough in the movie that it feels like an introduction after a cold open. But it happens a few more times, seemingly coming out of nowhere and upsetting the tone. It doesn’t happen with any sort of consistency, or enough that it feels like a thought-out part of the movie, but more like a sloppy afterthought to stitch plot points together.

The sound editing also gets progressively worse as the movie drags on, with sound effects and eventually even dialogue becoming entirely disconnected from what they’re meant to correspond with on screen. By the end, someone would fire a gun and the sound of gunshots wouldn’t be dubbed in until several seconds later. And for my fellow English-speakers, the subtitles – at least in the version I watched – were incomplete. This is a very Japanese movie with a Japanese intended audience, but I have a feeling that not many of my readers are Japanese, so be warned that the accessibility of this film may not be all that.

Last of the Wolves is very much not my kind of movie, but I fear its technical issues may be a turnoff even for those who are into crime drama. But it’s far from the worst thing out there, so if tales of the yakuza are your speed, it might be worth judging for yourself.

The film will screen as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, happening August 6-22.

 

3 out of 10

 

Last of the Wolves
RATING: R
The Blood of Wolves: Level 2 (2021) Japanese Movie Trailer Eng Subs (孤狼の血Level2 特報 英語字幕)
Runtime: 2 Hrs. 29 Mins.
Directed By:
Written By:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About the Author

Elaine L. Davis is the eccentric, Goth historian your parents (never) warned you about. Hailing from the midwestern United States, she grew up on ghost stories, playing chicken with the horror genre for pretty much all of her childhood until finally giving in completely in college. (She still has a soft spot for kid-friendly horror.) Her favorite places on Earth are museums, especially when they have ghosts.