I was really looking forward to this movie for months now. The idea of Japan's most internationally famous directors making an English language western sounds like a must see. Well...<br /><br />Language was my first problem. You can tell that just about every actor doesn't know how to speak English, and that his/her lines were fed to them. I'd guesstimate that no more than 30 minutes out of the nearly 2 hour long movie were action scenes, so this movie was very full of dialog and story....only I could understand maybe %20 of it. It's really bad, probably as bad when Quentin Tarantino speaks little bits of Japanese in this film to a native Japanese speaker. Except this wasn't a few lines, but the whole movie being broken English. In Sukiyaki Western, the Language gets in the way of the story telling(I had no idea what was happening a lot of the time), and the acting. I'd much rather have had Japanese dialog with English subtitles...or at least English subtitles anyway, which were not available to me.<br /><br />The language is really a minor issue for me, because the whole movie itself was pretty poor. The script was simple and bland. I think they dumbed down the dialog to make it easier on the actors, because it was something I could have written up in the time it took to watch the film. Also, there were many failed attempts at humor. The jokes failed because the actors could not deliver them naturally.<br /><br />There was no character development, I didn't care about ANY person in the whole movie. The hero, if you can call him that, is a completely unneeded character. Another thing, and I don't consider this a spoiler....every single character in the whole movie was a blubbering idiot...like a bad guy from a Saturday morning kids show.<br /><br />The action was minimal, and the finale didn't do anything for me at all. <br /><br />The costumes. Yeah a couple of the leaders looked cool, aka they looked like members of a J-Rock band. None of the clothing was authentic, and I don't think it was supposed to be, but I thought the red Old Navy neck sweater on one dude was too much. The white gangs' leader dude wouldn't take much work to look like a hot girl.<br /><br />To it's credit, there was some cool style and cinematography going on, and if the whole movie was like the first 5 minutes, minus Quentin because he's a bad actor, This movie would have been awesome. <br /><br />It should have been 90 minutes, tops. It should have been awesome stylized action with heads rolling and arterial spray, then the bad acting, script and story could be overlooked. Instead it was 2 hours with tons of bad jokes and a few unsatisfying shootouts. <br /><br />I wanted to like it, and i know a lot of you people spending $50 on a Japanese import DVD might feel obligated to....but this was just a poorly made movie.