A teenage girl becomes the leader of a small yakuza clan, and she must woman up if she wants to survive.
Sailor Suit and Machine Gun is a movie with an interesting cover and an interesting title, but that’s all. In the movie, we follow a teenage girl who lives a normal life, going to school and doing things like that. Then her father dies, and after that, she becomes the leader of a small yakuza clan.
She is a naïve young girl who doesn’t understand how dangerous this yakuza world is. So she must learn the hard way, but luckily for her, one of her men tries to teach her how dangerous this world is, and he also tries to protect her the whole time. But then a mysterious cop shows up together with a mysterious woman, and a dangerous yakuza leader wants a shipment of heroin that he thinks the girl has in her possession. A lot of things are going on in her life, and she also must leave school because of her new dangerous life.
This is a long movie with a runtime of 130 minutes. My main problem with this movie is that the protagonist, meaning the young girl, never learns anything, it seems, and she’s pretty stupid in 90% of the movie. She never seems to learn from her mistakes. She is indeed a woman! If this is supposed to be a coming-of-age drama, well, it’s a bad one!
Another problem is that the editing is a mess, and you have some scenes that end too abruptly. So the storytelling in Sailor Suit and Machine Gun is a mess, where scenes just end, and I hate that when I feel the movie needs to explain more about what happened and stuff like that. But here, it just ends and jumps to the next scene without much explanation.
The movie also mixes genres, and it doesn’t work. In the beginning, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun is more like a comedy, like the South Korean movie My Wife Is a Gangster, but then it turns into a darker movie where people get killed, and it doesn’t seem like the protagonist and her men grieve too much when they lose one of their members in the clan. And why is that? I guess it’s because they don’t have any character depth.
Towards the end, the movie gets more confusing with some strange scenes featuring the most dangerous yakuza leader, who sits in a wheelchair and sort of crucifies the protagonist in a strange scene where she starts singing. The scenes with this guy in a wheelchair feel so weird and out of place, so if you like movies that are all over the place, maybe you will appreciate the movie more than I did.
I was, for the most part, pretty bored while watching the movie. It’s a long movie with a slow pace and several slow scenes, and the editing and pacing are off. And towards the end, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun feel more like an exploitation movie where the director took some LSD—which I guess some will find interesting—but I was personally hoping for a more normal and half-charming movie without Japanese dirty perverts who like teenage girls too much. But at the same time, that didn’t come as a surprise, did it?