Serdar | Genji Press

The original plan was to call the band Life, but downtown New Yorkers Alan Vega and Martin Rev were barely hanging onto life as it was. Vega was at the time the custodian of an art venue named the Project of Living Artists, funded by New York State, where he and a whole mess of other musicians, artists, and hangers-on met in a second-story loft to woodshed, swap ideas, perform, hang out, get high, and get by as best they could. It was open around the clock, and everyone took turns making sure the place was kept intact (along with the people in it). When it wasn’t his turn to perform or oversee, Vega would grab what little sleep he could in a pup tent he’d erected in the back of a nearby abandoned lot. Food was a luxury: one Blimpie tuna-fish sandwich a day between the two of them, if they were lucky. Winters were murderous. Friends were all anybody had.

Vega’s original inspirations were the visual arts, photography and sculpture. He’d had gallery showings that consisted ropes of Christmas lights arranged on the floor, but it wasn’t until he saw Iggy Pop performing as the frontman of the Stooges in 1969 at the World’s Fair that music opened itself up as a possibility for him. To see someone expressing himself that nakedly, that violently on stage, both with and through the music, was nothing short of inspirational. Martin Rev had come from a highly musical family and had been playing organ and electric piano with various jazz outfits (his main inspiration in his youth was Thelonious Monk). When Vega saw him at the Living Artists space one night in 1971, the two of them were drawn together like unpaired oxygen atoms.

There are so few genuinely original movies out there that I tend to coddle the ones I see that have a shred of originality in them. For that reason I wanted to go easy on Yamakasi, which takes one wonderful idea and absolutely kills it dead with a story that’s a shameless retread of bits and pieces of dozens of other movies. This, for me, is a depressing movie: We’re promised something exciting and new, and then we wind up suffering through yet another dumb concoction about Heroes Racing Against Time To Save A Little Kid In The Hospital. Even more disappointing is learning it was written and produced by Luc Besson, who has made a career out of movies that straddle the line between challenging and commercial. Yamakasi falls down on the commercial side of the line, hard.

The film deals with a crew of seven urban daredevils—the Yamakasi of the title—who do things like scale buildings barehanded, leap from rooftop to rooftop like Morpheus in The Matrix, and pull all sorts of other, similar stunts just for the sheer thrill and exhilaration of doing it. This is great stuff, not just because it’s clear that they’re all doing these things unaided and without CGI or doubles, but because they make it look like such effortless fun. Then we get to the actual story—which opens with a snotty police captain who hates the Yamakasi for stealing their thunder, or creating a nuisance, or whatever—and my heart collapsed. Great way to ruin a wonderful premise. (The character, by the way, is brought back for exactly one more scene and then abandoned, which told me that even the filmmakers did not have much faith in him either.)

We don’t just get the Pig-Headed Pigs, either. We also get the Kid In Danger subplot, and when this element came in—barely fifteen minutes into the movie, mind you—I groaned out loud. One of the boys who idolizes the Yamakasi tries to imitate them, falls out of a tree, and in the “24 hours before we have to do a heart transplant” the Yamakasi hatch a plan: Rob the men who run the organ-transplant intermediary company, and use their own money to pay for the kid’s transplant. Oh, and before that, they even save the boy’s distraught mother from jumping off a building—but we know she’s not doomed because the music doesn’t cut off abruptly when she falls.