Final Rating: 3/5
An urban explorer on a trip to Japan runs into trouble with the Yakuza while trying to sell vintage jeans in Vintage Violence.
Cole Sprouse stars as Carter, a Colorado streamer under the handle “How they lived” who makes a living breaking into abandoned buildings in search of treasure. After discovering a box full of original Levi’s jeans, Carter is persuaded by a fan, Izumi (Kiko Mizuhara) to fly out to Japan to sell his find to a collector.
Unbeknownst to Carter, Izumi and her boyfriend Hiro (Nijiro Murakami) are planning to steal the jeans and keep the money for themselves. In yet another wrinkle, Hiro’s denim collector contact is a high-ranking member of a Yakuza crime family, who never planned to pay for the jeans anyway.
Once the multi-pronged comedy of errors set up by director Eugene Kotlyarenko gets going, Vintage Violence flies. Carter’s foreign man in a foreign land plot puts him at the mercy of everyone from his own fans to the US embassy, while Hiro’s trouble with the Yakuza inches closer. At the same time, tensions within the Yakuza make for compelling drama amongst the film’s villains.
Vintage Violence is best when all its competing plots occur simultaneously. Editors Sabrina Greco and Tucker Bennett are firing on all cylinders, condensing Carter and Izumi’s hyperactive realities into a coherent, high-energy narrative. In addition to traditionally shot footage, Vintage Violence uses phone screens showing apps like Snapchat, Instagram, and Google Maps, as well low-resolution Kick and TikTok streams. The film regularly switches between sources, even splitting the screen to show events from different perspectives or give insight into characters’ minds.
One sequence early on juxtaposes Carter’s stream from the abandoned mine with Izumi fighting with her boss in the bathroom after having her phone stolen. Much later, Carter’s stream is placed alongside more traditional footage during a firefight to show essentially two different bystander perspectives of Carter in over his head.
Sound designer Jan Bezouska also gets to stand out. YouTube-style sound effects are inserted throughout the film. A character will make finger guns, supported by quiet “pew pew”s. Darts hit a dartboard with a satisfying flourish, or miss with a failure buzzer. Most notably, a song being listened to by two characters through earbuds starts to break up as those characters get further away from each other – a bit of sound design that ends up being useful when one of those characters later must locate the other.
Vintage Violence’s best moments are more than worth the price of admission, though the film drags in between. When characters aren’t frantically navigating multiple conversations or chasing each other around Tokyo, Kotlyarenko slows down to spend time fleshing out his characters.
That said, the cast is largely boisterous and designed to work well in big comical misunderstandings. Carter is an internet clown; Hiro is a gambling addict whose habits will always land him on the wrong side of the wrong people; the main Yakuza characters are a young upstart who has made denim his entire personality, and an older bruiser with a robotic middle finger that sprays drugs. It’s not that there can’t be more to these characters, but even in terms of characterization, they’re best fleshed out by letting them hit each other and do silly stunts.
The exception is Izumi, who serves as something of a moral centre for the film. As the person who tells Carter to come to Japan, she’s the one who kicks off the entire plot, and rapidly finds herself in the middle of three worlds. During the film’s slower moments, Izumi stays energized as she keeps on top of all the different players’ whereabouts while constantly recalibrating her own relationships and plans for the jeans. Though she often seems at the mercy of events happening around her, Mizuhara’s performance lends Izumi a confidence that makes Violence feel more like a story of her finding her freedom than anything else.
Violence escalates from a movie about an influencer going to Japan, to a story about a group of young adults in trouble with the Yakuza, to a chase between larger-than-life personalities fighting over apparently life-changing pairs of jeans. When it works, it’s ridiculous and captivating and sells that escalation beautifully. The problem is that Kotlyarenko can’t keep that energy constant, and when Violence slows down, it doesn’t have as much going for it.
Vintage Violence was seen during the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival
