Azumi (2003)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Based on a popular manga series centring around a young girl who is raised by assassins and eventually set on a mission to kill off some warlords who threaten the peace of Japan.More samurai than you can shake a stick at, yes we've seen this kind of thing before but for some reason that doesn't matter. There is nothing better than seeing a well made Japanese film about their past, yes this has a lot of artistic license and is more fantasy based but its still damn fun.A curious set of characters all led by their strict master and all played well by the cast, Aya Ueto as 'Azumi' is ultra cute, not the most authentic looking samurai but this is manga adaptation. The rest of the cast are unknown to me but do the job well, nothing too special or original but its entertaining. The deadly character of 'Bijomaru Mogami' is fun, an egotistical lethal merc who kills pretty much anyone for fun and is dressed all in flowing white, think along the lines of 'Vega' from the Street Fighter II video game franchise.Action is fast fluid and bloody when it kicks in as you might expect but its not over done. There is the odd moment of high flying wire work which spoils it in my view, they love that in Japan for some reason. The plot is simple and easily followed, the film looks great in terms of costumes, weapons and location and it comes across perfectly as an adaptation.7/10

I'm not really into martial art flicks but I do search the old ones still on VHS or when some pops up for almost no money then I pick them up. Azumi was one of them, part 1 and 2 was bought for almost 2 euro's and they were new, go figure that one. So I thought, well, it's going to be crap but hey, what a surprise. It clocks in over 2 hours and it never bored me. Of course as a exploitation/horror geek I was looking for the effects used and sadly sometimes they used CGI blood but the story and the so typical Asian way of filming overruled the use of CGI. Based on a comic luckily it didn't had that overacting or the so typical costumes used in the American flicks. Again, be aware that it is really an Asian flick by which I mean that you will need to understand their way of living and their way of filming. You know, flying through the air and the typical way of using ninja swords. It never is really gory or messy but the red stuff do flows. There are some jokes in it but what really attracted me was the gay samurai. Fully dressed in white and walking with a red rose. It's funny to see and perfectly filmed. It isn't an original flick but if you are open for Asian martial art ones than I surely would recommend it.

The movie kind of left me pretty skeptic from the very start. I mean, if this guy is so concerned with making peace, why on earth would he train 10 assassins to go and kill a bunch of people? It's not the smartest way to make peace I've heard of... And then he tells them to kill each other so only half is left. And they obey, like mindless zombies. Which is really odd because in the previous scene it was obvious they were all a bunch of fun loving and innocent kids. And then soon afterward they're not traumatized in any way, in stead they're joking around and laughing like the rest of us. Not to mention the girl later on who almost gets raped and has all her friends killed before her very eyes. But she just smiles and carries on like nothing happened.The fight scenes were OK. But they got pretty tedious after a while. 2 hours and 20 minutes is pretty long for a movie with no plot to talk about. And you never really knew who you should want to win, because pretty much all the characters were ass holes anyway. There was nothing that made the 'bad guys' seem like bad guys. And there was nothing heroic about the heroes either. So basically the movie was just a an excuse to have a bunch of guys get killed on screen with some nice action choreography slapped on top. The only obviously bad guy in the movie was that white clad dude. But he was also the weakest character, simply a typical anime stereotype.I give the movie a six out of ten, feeling pretty generous. Because I did still enjoy the action, and there were some touching moments, however surreal they felt.

I'm a fan of movies like the Seven Samurai, and others like it, but this movie... It was frankly a yawn-fest.First off, I stopped watching this about half-way though because I got bored with it, so I'll be up front about not having seen the whole movie. The acting was sub-par, the villains and their motivations cardboard cutouts of any Asian warlord stereotype you've ever seen, the protagonists not much better.It seemed to try to imply that the situation was *serious*, that the bad guys were *evil*, but... Between the 'pop stars somehow landed a role in an actual movie' heroes and the 'warlord #12, #15 and #1324', it just failed miserably.In fact, literally every person on screen was a walking stereotype. It was that bad.Unless you're someone who was a fan of the original manga, or are very easily satisfied by anyone in a movie who swings a sharp sword around, prepare to be disappointed.