| Director Ryuhei Kitamura is
getting more attention in America these days.
Several of his movies have been released stateside,
and he miffed (or delighted) legions of Godzilla
fans with his decidedly alternative vision in
Godzilla:
Final Wars (2004), which I liked. As I
understand it, his comic-book samurai epic, Azumi,
was even given a limited theatrical release and
a two-disc special edition DVD package in the
USA. I decided to see what the hubbub was about.
Several of my students were also excited about
the film a while ago, and I had been meaning to
give it a whirl. After sitting through it's two
hours plus of wild bloodshed, I can say along
with her many opponents that I could have lived
without ever seeing Azumi.
War sucks. This is the conclusion
that warrior Gessai (Yoshio Harada) comes to after
a particularly bloody battle that leaves thousands
upon thousands of warriors in a carpet of death
and chaos across the ruins of a battlefield. Peace
of the shaky-jello sort has been achieved, but
won't last long before the obnoxious warlords
who support the child prince Hideyori Tomoteyo
for the throne will foment battle again. Gessai
can see only one option: his own troupe of personally
trained super-assassins proficient at warlord-whacking.
To this end, he apparently goes about and nabs
random little kids on his way to the training
ground, including Azumi (Aya
Ueto) who, from all appearances, was out on
a walk with her mom in the wastes when she (her
mom) suddenly dropped dead. Thankfully, the warlords
wait until their assassins are all grown up before
they even think about doing any of their trademark
warmongering.
The ten assassins become adults
in the space of a scene change, training energetically
while dashing about on steep inclines. However,
these pre-assassins are not very grim or focused,
appearing more like a bunch of college jocks—except
with less discipline and more jumping. Gessai
intones that they will be setting out on their
mission soon, and our lovely assassins laugh and
celebrate as if he had just announced he was getting
married.
Azumi and her nine fellow ninjas
(wait… they're not ninjas. Later some ninjas
show up and Gessai classifies his troupe as something
else. But aren't ninjas assassins who use swords
and stuff? I'm confused.) assemble the following
morning, and Gessai announces that they are leaving
the training ground to sally forth into the Outer
World, their glorious mission ahead of them. He
commands that every assassin must choose a partner,
someone he likes, and it looks for a moment that
everyone's partner is going to be Azumi. However,
this isn't a square dance party. Gessai drops
the predictable rules of the game. The last test
to becoming a sword-wielding, decapitation machine
is… kill your buddy!
And this pretty much sets the tone
for the rest of the movie. The assassins, reduced
to five, are required again and again to grimly
relieve folks of their blood supplies while ignoring
the plight of the innocent. Of course, they don't
always obey, and they remain their college-jock
selves—except that they can jump over tall
buildings or throw a rock into the water to kill
dozens of fish. Azumi is a mish-mash of
brooding, blood-washed violence and off-the-wall
goofiness that completely disregards reality for
the money shot. In other words, it's a pretty
standard Ryuhei Kitamura film, with a slightly
larger dollop of broodiness.
Of course, even in the brooding,
the absurd is there. Slashing swords are often
accompanied by sudden, meter-high streams of blood
and gargling death sounds, even in the grim moments.
(Yes, people dying isn't always grim—in
fact, in a Ryuhei Kitamura film, it often isn't.)
For example, when one of the assassins kills himself
to aid his brethren in a supposedly touching scene,
his neck gushes like a fire hydrant. It's a little
difficult to know whether to wince or to laugh.
The quality of the action is, predictably,
uneven. Azumi is plagued by the standard group
behavior of warriors—that is, to dance about
malevolently in the background while the good
guys calmly ventilate those brave enough to come
forward one by one. It's supposed to look cool,
and it does—for a while. However, most of
it looks like stuff you've seen in a million Hong
Kong kung-fu flicks, except with less actual martial
arts. Several action scenes early on are gut-busting
for the wrong reasons, including bandits hesitantly
and gently skewering their prey, folks bleeding
before they are cut, swords obviously missing
the bodies of their victims, and, everybody's
favorite, visible wires on a jumping warrior.
This isn't to say that Kitamura
has lost his edge, really. He wreaks death on
his characters with the occasional flashes of
over-the-top, goofy-fun style that his fans love.
There's the scene, for example, when Azumi intercepts
an incoming arrow with her blade, which neatly
bisects it and deflects the two halves into the
waiting foreheads of her foes. The final big fight
includes a completely, utterly ridiculous finishing
move that makes the infamous death of the final
vampire in Underworld look perfectly logical and
probable by comparison. However, Kitamura has
always been very uneven, and the fights go on
so long that I was just waiting for the movie
to end, which it never seems to. Instead, we get
something akin to the drawn-out ending agony that
finished The Return of the King, except
infinitely more absurd. Hint: Azumi seems to have
developed teleportation powers.
As for the characters, there are
a lot of them, and with good reason: they keep
dying. This might be a bit of a spoiler, but as
a general rule, if the character isn't named Azumi,
he's probably going to die. Most of the characters
aren't particularly deep, either, partially because
they just don't have time to be. Azumi herself
is the most well-drawn as she struggles with her
calling to kill and her desires to protect and
retain her humanity. She constantly questions
why she is killing and half-heartedly wants to
escape the cycle, but the ubiquitous, unpredictable
violence of the world always brings the sword
back into her hands. Aya
Ueto's performance as Azumi, however, is shoddy.
She can swing a blade well enough, but if she
has to show emotion, it never seems genuine. For
some reason, whenever she is laughing about something
or being buddy-buddy with her fellow assassins,
she always looks fake, and not because she is
too tough to laugh or doesn't know how. She does
a pretty credible job looking tough when called
to, though, in a cute, "my-hair-is-dyed-and-always-perfect"
way.
The other characters fare worse.
The award for second most-developed character
is a tie between Hyuga (Kenji Kohashi) and his
girlfriend, Yae (Aya Okamoto). That is to say,
at least their characters develop something beyond
a battleground affection for each other, and Yae
actually has aspirations for her life and helps
Azumi find her feminine side. However, their characters
aren't deep enough for a goldfish to comfortably
swim, and the rest are much worse.
Gessai, for example, as portrayed
by Yoshio Harada, is just dumb, coming off as
a bad disciplinarian one moment and then a sadistic
twerp the next. Unfortunately, Harada as the master
was less convincing to me than Master Splinter
often is in Ninja Turtles.
Speaking of those sewer-dwelling
reptiles, a number of the characters in Azumi
would fit well into the world of talking animals.
Azumi's population seems largely composed
of weird, animalistic, bloodthirsty men—sometimes
entire villages of them. Actually, amongst the
supporting cast, there are quite the number of
Kitamura movie regulars playing deadly, somewhat
odd characters. Tak Sakaguchi, who was the main
anti-hero from Versus, plays a dim-witted mercenary
who likes to stab holes in his hands. He's always
fun to watch. Kazuki Kitamura, perhaps best known
as the spastic and traitorous alien leader in
Godzilla:
Final Wars, turns in a more mildly sneering
performance as a bodyguard to the warlord Kiyomasa.
Kiyomasa is played by Naoto Takenaka. I've seen
him many times. He is in everything from Shall
We Dance? (1996) to The Great Yokai
War to Water
Boys (2001). He is a fine actor, and here
respectably snarls and chews scenery with panache.
Also memorable is Minoru Matsumoto's turn as Saru,
a monkey-like warrior who, while fighting, moves
like an ape and has monkey and dog sound-effects
edited into his scenes. And one cannot forget
the psycho who serves as the final boss, Bijomaru,
though I aim to try after I finish this review.
Jo Odagiri plays the whiny slimeball to the hilt
(of his sword), although your appreciation of
his performance will depends on your taste for
effeminate murderers who prance and giggle at
the sight of carnage.
Azumi's soundtrack is, like
everything else, mixed. Sometimes the film employs
heroic instrumental music that includes piano
and traditional instruments such as the shamisen.
Sometimes it's beat-heavy mediocre electronic
music. Sometimes it's incredibly cheesy guitar
riffs. Overall, it's not good, although it might
be just marginally better than the stuff in Godzilla:
Final Wars (2004).
I'm not much of a fan of Ryuhei
Kitamura. His work is just too much a patchwork
of derivative material that barely holds together.
It's fun stuff if you are highly forgiving and
have the stomach for it. For me, though, Azumi
doesn't cut it.
|
(2/5)