The good news about Sukiyaki Western Django is that Quentin Tarantino appears only in the prologue and a short bit toward the end. The bad news is that, even without his physical presence, we are never quite rid of him. Director Takashi Miike’s dish of sukiyaki spaghetti à la Sergio Corbucci is badly seasoned with scraps of reservoir dogs.

The prospect of spending two hours with Tarantino in a Clint Eastwood poncho, posing as the hero of a campy takeoff on an Italian Western, is nearly unbearable, so when the scene flashes back to the feuding Genji and Heiki clans some centuries after the 12th-century battle of Dannoura, there is a moment of relief that Tarantino will be our narrator and not our protagonist.

The hero is played by Hideaki Ito, who pits the two gangs against each other, as did Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo and Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. The exact details of the story are hard to decipher, as little of the dialogue is intelligible since the English dubbing is done by the non-English speaking Japanese cast. The intent must have been to approximate poorly dubbed Italian Westerns, but the effect is near gibberish.

The male actors are mostly camp interpretations of stock Western characters, along the lines of Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys. The women are more interesting. Kaori Momoi’s macho heroine and Yoshino Kimura’s town prostitute are more specifically drawn than the interchangeable gunfighters and sword slingers.

Sense and sensibility has never been Miike’s strong point.

What we expect from him is a barrage of outrageous and unexpected sight gags. Here his imagination is so shackled by genre clichés that his moves are predictable even when his story line is incoherent.

**Sukiyaki Western Django

Starring: Quentin Tarantino, Hideaki Ito, Kaori Momoi, Yusuke Iseya, Takaaki Ishibashi, Koichi Sato, Yoshino Kimura

Rated: R, strong violence