Review of Shogun Assassin (1980) by Andres B — 10 Jan 2009

Shogun Assassin is is about a samurai who is targeted for assassination by his master the Shogun. The Shogun's men manage to only kill the samurai's wife before the samurai escapes with his infant son and then more or less are relegated to live a life on the run from the Shogun's assassins who pop up and follow them wherever they go.

The movie starts off with some promise, I like the idea of a bad guy who is not operating out of nefarious motives, but is only doing what he does because he is mentally ill (the samurai and his family did not pose a threat to the Shogun at all)l, and is paranoid of absolutely everybody. I can only stop to think that if they only had court psychiatrists and a few milligrams of Invega back in the Japanese feudal period, barring being killed by rival clans, the Shogun and the samurai and his family would probably have lived in peace to old age.

There is a lot of interesting narration by the son... but as the movie progresses it starts digressing into mostly boring action sequences (action scenes not well done mind you since I do think there can be exciting films mostly composed of action sequences, that is when they are well done), with only a few interesting shots thrown in for good measure.

This is certainly not in the league of the Samurai Trilogy in terms of character development and story... but that's probably because Shogun Assassin is a heavily distilled version of two films.... it seems that the American editors of this film (this was never released as one film in Japan) took out all of the story and character centric scenes of the original and simply mashed the action scenes together into a one and a half hour sludge. One and a half hours that seem to take forever to finish. Samurai Trilogy I was over two hours long, but the pace of that movie was brisk thanks to a compelling story and characters.

The characters in this film have a potential to be intriguing, this is clear from the opening scenes, but any potential is sapped by the way Shogun Assassin was edited.

Or then again I may be wrong, it may not be the editing that's the problem. The author of the manga Kazuo Koike likes to fill his works with long action sequences with minimal dialogue.... and that itself isn't a problem to me... but when you compress a story that's meant to be told in more than one breath (the manga series went on for dozens of volumes) there can be problems with the way things fit together.

I think I'm going to watch Lone Wolf and Cub the way they were meant to be seen, as two separate films, and then come back with a review of those movies and tell you if they are better or worse than Shogun Assassin.

If worse, they must be pretty awful.