It’s pretty much impossible to deny the goofy allure of R100. A boring furniture salesman joins an S&M club whose terms are ridiculous: At any moment—at home, at work, walking down the street—he could be attacked by dominatrices, and he can’t leave the club until his yearlong membership is up.
Dominatrix sneak-attacks are surprisingly entertaining, it turns out, and R100 appreciates the slapstick appeal of a guy being repeatedly kicked in the face with a stiletto-heeled boot. Just as the film teeters into an action-movie parody, though, R100 starts to suffer from serious bloat.
The protagonist’s love of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” feels obvious. A series of postmodern jokes about the film being a film come from (and go) absolutely nowhere—director Hitoshi Matsumoto can’t seem to decide if R100 is tonally closer to a Japanese John Waters movie or more of a riff on Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber.
And the monotony of some scenes, where certain actions—grenade explosions, a dominatrix spitting on a submissive man, another dominatrix leaping angrily into a pool—are repeated over and over, quickly transition from amusing to annoying. 