Hey kids, you ready for Third Rate Cinema? No? Well I sure am! I love bad movies and doing all these topical movies all the time is just getting me down. I really wanna sink my teeth into some utter crap. So no, this review isn't of the usual 'topical importance' but I hope we have some fun anyway. Enjoy!
Anyway, time for some sword fighting! A young baby in the plane crash is found by a Samurai Master and he teaches the boy the way of the Samurai, ultimately teaching him a samurai's apparent greatest weapon, their apparent six sense. Their ability to combine their senses and see with their mind. I'm not really sure if this is a super power, or just the usual melodramatic stuff they cram into movies like this but it never really becomes all that important anyway, so don't worry about it.
Apparently Samurai's are immortal too, because during this scene the boy grows into a man as he trains, while the Samurai Master himself doesn't age a day. Oh except for the fact they mixed flour into his moustache and eyebrows, I guess that is supposed to show his hair is greyer? If only all people only got slightly greyer facial hair and nothing else when they aged.
As the boy grows into a man, he completes his Samurai Training. Seriously, six minutes into the movie. I had to guess the boy was the baby from the plane crash, they don't tell you until about half an hour in, I don't think we find his name out until like an hour in so I'm calling him Boyman throughout the review. This movie ain't fucking around. Boyman is now all grown up and is gifted with the family katana, this unsurprisingly upsets Kenjiro the Samurai Master's actual son. But Kenjiro is the typical consumed by rage fighter, so he cannot be the most powerful until he overcomes his rage blahblah. Kenjiro is also a member of the Yakuza, as he feels betrayed by his father. And this only succeeds in him getting rejected by his father further, nice move kid, nice move...
Kenjiro's prime motivation in the film is to kill Boyman and take the family sword. Why he doesn't just do it there and then since he seems to think himself strong enough, I don't know. For dramatic purposes? Well I don't mind, him sending thugs to Boyman's house (they don't explain how he got this house or whatever, they just cut straight to it while in the last scene he had only just completed his training - he's also apparently a journalist now? A little bit of exposition for this would be nice movie. I never thought I'd ask a movie to slow down!) an undisclosed time later to steal the sword gave us our first proper action sequence and the action in this movie is fucking awesome. And amazingly the hero of the story doesn't really get his first proper tournament fight until an hour or so into the movie... Not that this says much, most of the characters we see warming up for the tournament never get an actual fight scene, they just vanish as times goes on.
And from here the awesomeness never really stops. I mean sure the movie jumps all over the place rarely giving any context or exposition meaning you have to fill in all the gaps yourself but we get crazy ass dream sequences, Samurai Superpower mumbo jumbo, amazing action. It isn't an oscar winning piece of cinema by a long shot, but it's definitely great fun. Oh, there are also some hilariously awkward sex scenes.
What really helps this movie is that it was made in 1992, so you know what that means? No CGI! What really cheapens a lot of movies like this, made after 2000 is the noticeable laptop CGI special effects, here because the effects are practical it all looks pretty good. Like there is one scene where our hero pulls a bullet from his stomach, the bullet wound is clearly non existent in some shots, in others I think they just burst a blood capsule in his belly button but the actual act of pulling the bullet out looks pretty damn convincing.
Most of the context and exposition is told, not shown. This movie is just so fucking fast, so fast they decided to not even bother filming any exposition and instead just decided to do it all in voice overs. The funny thing is, the first character we get any back story on is a character called Finley, which I guess is Boyman's editor? We haven't actually even seen him yet and we never actually do, eurgh movie! You have this all the wrong way round. It doesn't help either that these voice overs are AWFUL. Often the sound level isn't much higher than the music played over the stock footage, so we can barely hear it and other times bits of the voice over are cut off or they just add random sound effects over the top. Characters have whole conversations with each other, while they are doing something else and their mouths aren't moving. Or in some cases, the footage cuts away before characters finish speaking. The fuck is going on!
So I think the story of the film goes a little like this, but like I say, it never gives away much so excuse me if I get this wrong. Boyman is found by a Samurai Master after a plane he is travelling on as a baby for some reason crashes, for some reason... He completes his training and falls out with his half brother. After completing his training he moves to a city somewhere and becomes a journalist. As a journalist he is apparently an expert on swords and this takes him to Istanbul where some Saudi's have been killed by katanas and he has to find out who did it. Why him and not the police? Because he's an American Samurai! Boyman finds out the killer of the Saudi is Kenjiro because apparently every samurai has their own way of killing people. And guess what, pretty much NONE of this has anything to do with the main point of the movie, since the movie is really all about the tournament, so really you just watched forty minutes of nothing.
The little we actually see of the fighting tournament is clichéd as hell where the 'novelty' of this one is, that everyone uses weapons. Really really fake looking weapons. There is also one guy who looks a bit like Conan who dies and then is clearly seen in the background of the next scene, then a few scenes later we see the guy who killed 'Conan' and his injuries from the fight are gone and then in the next scene the announcer claims a totally different fight is the 'first one of the night'.
From this point forwards the movie has to have some of the worst editing I've ever seen in my entire life, scenes are blatantly out of order as peoples clothing change backwards and forwards, as stock footage is awkwardly fitted in, as wounds randomly appear and disappear, people jump around between shots and they reuse the same bits of footage over and over again. Awful, awful editing. Is it that hard to keep your film in order?
Despite how rushed most of the movie feels thanks to all context and exposition being removed, at the same time the film feels somehow, too brief. The tournament doesn't start until after half way through the film, so by the time the movie has established key tournament fighters and so on, there is so little time left of the film they just have to kill them off, making it all seem pointless. I guess the film feels so rushed because they are trying t cram so much into it.
So do I recommend this? It all depends on your patience. There is no which way about it, the editing is abysmal and it really hurts the entire experience. That being said, the special effects are great as is the action and the characters so the movie still manages to be a whole lot of fun. So if you have the patience to persevere through all the awful editing, you could probably have a lot of fun with the movie.
Think About It!
-Locke
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