Japanese Film Reviews: Azumi

 Azumi is a Japanese samurai movie and one that was a classic, it had all the ingredients of a manga film, with lots of samurai sword fighting and blood splattered fight sequences, I borrowed the DVD off my brother and have only got around to watching it, although there is a second Azumi film to watch in the pack, which I will definitely get around to watching as this one was just ace.

The story is simple, but yet effective in setting the scene, we see Azumi as a young girl and her mother has died, we don't know how, because it's not important, as a man and a few young children are travelling through, they take Azumi with them.

Cut to the present....

We then find out that the man has trained 10 assassins over the years and they are just about ready to begin their first mission, when their master drops a huge bombshell and says before you undertake your mission you have to pair up and kill the weakest one out the pair and this will leave five of the strongest assassins, they do this with a little bit of uncertainty.

This is a return to watching those classic Japanese movies I watched as a kid and other Hong Kong movie classics such as Hard boiled, there are subtitles to follow which some may find annoying, but they are easy to follow whilst you soak up the Japanese language and the action of bandits and historic warlords getting sliced and diced.

If you are used to these types of manga inspired movies, then you'll know that the stories are rather formulaic, but they serve to set up the movies ending with a lone Azumi slaughtering a few hundred of the bad guys with samurai swords, avenging the deaths of her assassin friends.

The movie is based on a Japanese comic presumably of the same name and you can see that some of the comic book violence has transferred excellently from the comic book with a vivid anime style and that to me is an excellent way of adapting from a book source, so if you like sword fights and a hot Japanese babe assassin to drool over then I do recommend this film.