REVIEW

Takashi Miike’s ‘FIRST LOVE’ Is a Rambunctious Yakuza Rom-Com, and That’s Awesome

Name: First Love review
Item: First Love
Rating: 4
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · October 3, 2019

Takashi Miike’s ‘FIRST LOVE’ Is a Rambunctious Yakuza Rom-Com, and That’s Awesome

Where to watch: Streaming on Prime Video and MUBI, free on Pluto TV, or rent or buy on digital (updated October 2026)Watch on Prime Video · Watch on Pluto TV · Rent or buy on Amazon · Buy on Blu-ray/4KAs an Amazon Associate, Silver Screen Riot earns from qualifying purchases.

For a man 59-years of age with well over 100 feature films under his belt, Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike shows no signs of slowing down. The prolific auteur has dabbled in everything from sweeping historical epics (13 Assassins) to slow-burn horror showstoppers (Audition) to schlocky gangster yarns (Ichi the Killer) to gory Samurai adventure flicks (Blade of the Immortal) to child-centric ninja fare (Ninja Kids!!!) with literal countless smaller projects filling in the gaps between those more high-profile pictures that end up playing in theaters internationally. With the director often making upwards of five, six, or seven films a year, it’s nothing short of incredible that he’s able to craft something as wildly enjoyable, energetic, and giddy as his most recent film, First Love, and yet here we are.

From its intentionally misleading name to its fatal scrum of rough-and-tumble criminals taking to outmatch each other, First Love is a Japanese take on True Romance, filtered through Miike’s signature twisted humor and ultra-violent, splatter tendencies. A mix-up of double-crosses, mistaken identities, stewing gangster rivalries, innocent bystanders caught in the fray, and sweet sweet heroin (and heroines!), the film funnels a whole fat sack of crime saga components through Miike’s madcap, take-no-prisoners storytelling technique and the result is uncut Yakuza rom-com movie mania. First Love movie still

Masataka Kubota is Leo, an orphan-turned-boxer, strong in the ring but held back by the fact that he lacks something worth fighting for. When he receives news that a newly-discovered brain tumor is rather aggressively cutting down his life expectancy, Leo finally finds something worth living for in the drug-addled but kind-hearted Monica (Sakurako Konishi), your friendly neighborhood prostitute. Unfortunately, she has been set up by the dodo duo of low-level Yakusa foot soldier Kase (Shote Sometani) and corrupt cop Otomo (Nao Ohmori), a pair who’ve plotted to rip off a sack of heroin and frame Monica, who herself has been forced into a life of turning tricks to pay off her drug-addicted father’s debts.

What follows is a comedy of errors as Kase and Otomo botch their half-witted heist at every turn while a none-the-wiser Leo and Monica, who bump into each other on the street fleeing the two would-be plotters, begin to develop feelings for one another. Their romance is pretty surface-level and underdeveloped but having two people who aren’t terrible monsters being chased down is enough to propel the action and give the audience someone worth rooting for. Miike sprinkles the margins with gleeful violence, often just as comical and accidental as the poorly-executed heist, before the film erupts into an all-out blitzkrieg of guns, machetes, samurai swords, baseball bats, golf clubs, and a pump-action shotgun wielded by a one-arm-man in its final chapter.

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Anything and everything is fair game in First Love with decapitated heads that blink out shock and awe, a ghost in a white sheet and tighty whities, and a sequence that goes full 80s neon-blasted animation. Miike is very much playing by his own rulebook and, like a man with a death sentence, there’s no limits to where he’s willing to pilot the chaos.

With a heavy stack of secondary characters, the script from Masa Nakamura (who previously partnered with Miike for The Bird People in China) is able to roughly define what makes various people tick, without necessarily illuminating much in the way of deeper meaning. This is important as the cast balloons to include various levels of Yakuza gangsters, all self-interested and with their own little schemes, the Chinese Triads, and the various characters connected to Leo and Monica. The dialogue is exposition-heavy and mainly there to drive plot, leading it to sometimes be overly wooden, but Nakamura finds moments of occasional poetry a la “Morning light doesn’t suit the wicked”. The lesser dialogue could be the result of something lost in translation but, fortunately, the zany plot beats and over-the-top characters help overshadow the weaker components of First Love and divert focus from the blades less sharp in its arsenal.

Loaded with Miike’s distinctive flair for action choreography, the film boasts some joyously bonkers set pieces. Whether that’s a car chase, sword fight, shootout, or boxing match, Miike grounds the absurdity in reality though it’s characters like Rebecca Eri Rabone’s (known in Japan mononymously as Becky) Juri, who becomes a feral beast drunk on revenge, who really make the feature sparkle and corner it within Miike’s legacy of pop-punk movie character insanity.

The level of energy escaping from every corner First Love is often akin to a Looney Toon, Miike directing with the same young-man ferocity that Scorsese brought to The Wolf of Wall Street. A moment where a fatally wounded man rubs heroin in his wounds and becomes invisible (at least in his mind) is the Japanese loony cousin to Leonardo DiCaprio pulling himself around on too many Quaaludes. Quite simply, this doesn’t feel like a movie a dude who’s almost 60 should be churning out and yet it channels all of Miike’s veteran instincts to make a wholly fulfilling dish of off-the-walls Japanese gangster love story. So get past any aversion to subtitles and get to watching First Love‘s sweet, bloody, dialed-past-11 antics.

CONCLUSION: Takashi Miike appears to be on top of his game, presenting a turducken of a love story in a gangster caper in a daffy crime drama. Giddily violent and stylish, ‘First Love’ is loaded with attitude, charisma, and character with some fuddy-duddy dialogue limiting it from true greatness.