I enjoyed the first movie in the famous Samurai trilogy, but I was considerably less impressed with this middle film.
The disjointedness of the first movie is even more noticeable here. There are a lot of characters and subplots and characters that don't really go anywhere.
Much of the movie is laughably absurd, such as the way women fall at their feet over the rather bland protagonist (Mifune isn't nearly as memorable in these films as in his Kurosawa movies), and the determination of the students of a fighting school have in protecting their master at the expense of his reputation makes little sense, especially as Musashi keeps mowing them down.
The whole looking-for-people-to-kill premise seems a bit weird as well; in American westerns it's usually the bad guys who keep picking fights. And the rather standard "there's more to being a Samurai than killing" message seems murky; it's no wonder Musashi takes so long to get it.
Some of this may just be cultural, with tropes that make sense to the Japanese. But I can't see any way to excuse the use of master swordsman Sasaki. He's a really interesting character, well acted by Koji Tsuruta, but the whole movie is his just happening to be in the right place at the right time, and it's an incredibly lazy screen writing crutch.
As in the previous movie, the sympathetic Otsu and women in general are treated by dirt even by those who care about them. That may be accurate, but it's also depressing.
Visually the film is striking, and the combat scenes are well done and pretty entertaining, but overall this movie is poorly structured and generally absurd.
The disjointedness of the first movie is even more noticeable here. There are a lot of characters and subplots and characters that don't really go anywhere.
Much of the movie is laughably absurd, such as the way women fall at their feet over the rather bland protagonist (Mifune isn't nearly as memorable in these films as in his Kurosawa movies), and the determination of the students of a fighting school have in protecting their master at the expense of his reputation makes little sense, especially as Musashi keeps mowing them down.
The whole looking-for-people-to-kill premise seems a bit weird as well; in American westerns it's usually the bad guys who keep picking fights. And the rather standard "there's more to being a Samurai than killing" message seems murky; it's no wonder Musashi takes so long to get it.
Some of this may just be cultural, with tropes that make sense to the Japanese. But I can't see any way to excuse the use of master swordsman Sasaki. He's a really interesting character, well acted by Koji Tsuruta, but the whole movie is his just happening to be in the right place at the right time, and it's an incredibly lazy screen writing crutch.
As in the previous movie, the sympathetic Otsu and women in general are treated by dirt even by those who care about them. That may be accurate, but it's also depressing.
Visually the film is striking, and the combat scenes are well done and pretty entertaining, but overall this movie is poorly structured and generally absurd.