Azumi

A lot of running through the woods, katana duels with oddly dosed splashes of blood, and a final action inferno unfolding in hastily painted chipboard sets... Samurai movies have always been about honor. This is a spectacle following the classic modern editing style, which is emotionally cold as a dog's snout because such a heap of characters won't really engage you. And Azumi herself is not up to it! (2005.08.11)

Yeah, the scene at the end where Azumi gets it on with the long-haired dude in white is really good – the best part of the whole movie, in my opinion. Fine, but otherwise? A piddling film with an overly long running time but a lot of old familiar faces that I really liked seeing together (except that they didn't stick around long; I wanted to watch the movie for the sake of seeing Hiroki and Shun together and got nothing out of it). So Jae seemed like an artificially planted figurine whose job was to delay our assassins' assault (actually, to delay the two of them), but I only had this line for her: "You're good, just get lost." If you like sword swinging, this is a movie you might enjoy. If you don't like that, or hectoliters of blood, then don't even try it, because it doesn't offer much else. And notice that Azumi doesn't get injured for the entire movie, I give that plus points :-) That's another thing I liked. (2010.12.28)

I can't help it, but it seems like the creators tried to follow in the footsteps of big Chinese productions like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", but in the end, they came up with a rather small film where the emotions are not portrayed as well as they should be, not to mention that the movie "Azumi" is not particularly interesting even from an action perspective. (2016.06.21)