‘Sukiyaki Western Django’ is a fun if odd mess

There’s no reason a spaghetti Western couldn’t be staged in Japan — after all, the Italian filmmakers who made spaghetti Westerns were already seizing a genre that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

So director Takashi Miike has made a Sukiyaki Western, in English, with gunslingers and six-shooters and somebody saying, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” Seriously, somebody says that.

And just to lay the blessing of grindhouse coolness on the project, “Sukiyaki Western Django” has a role for Quentin Tarantino, godfather of reference-heavy cult pictures.

All of this should guarantee a certain audience, and those of the fanboy persuasion should go at all costs. But by any objective standard, this movie is a mess — maybe a fun one at times, but a mess.

There is no hope of describing the plot. Let’s just say it’s about a lone gunman courted by two warring factions in a small town — the plot of Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo,” later made into pasta by Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars.”

Onto this blueprint Miike heaps mounds of complications; at times the characters in the film compare the battles to the War of the Roses, and indeed separate themselves into red and white factions.

The no-name gunman who rides into this supposedly Old West town is played by Hideaki Ito. Like the rest of the cast (except for Teruyuki Kagawa’s amusingly indestructible sheriff) he spends much of his role striking poses and twirling madly through Miike’s violent ballets.

That the dialogue is in English adds another layer of derangement to the experience. Miike himself doesn’t speak English, and at least some of the cast seem to be delivering their lines phonetically — so that fact that most of the dialogue is Western cliches is perhaps meant to be part of the joke.

All of this will give diehard fans some enjoyment, although even they will be hard-pressed to follow the story. The impressive sets and Miike’s skill with the camera can’t carry the 98 minutes on their own.

And Tarantino? He has a couple of big scenes, one of them in old-age make-up — more evidence that the whole thing is a spoof. He speaks his dialogue with a quasi-Japanese accent, too. That makes perfect sense within the rest of the madness.