Swords, Ninjas, Swords, and Ryuhei Kitamura

I saw Azumi a few years ago in Philadelphia, and recently, perusing around online I happened upon a trailer for it on Apple. It looks like we are going to get an extremely limited release of this festival favorite in the states! I figured I should watch the DVD I had and write a review so you all will know what you are getting into.Before watching it again, I decided I was going to write my review on what I call “Fan-favorite Festival Films.” These are the films that mostly come from Japan. After a long day of watching Danish dramas, its good to sit back, relax, and watch some crazy, colorful swordplay in a packed theater. It feels good to unwind your brain and just enjoy a film instead of having to intellectualize one. When you watch a film like that in a theater, you are likely to give it a great rating just because it was more fun and different then anything else you saw that day. Then, a few months later, you buy the DVD from Ebay and sit back by yourself and watch it at home and it is just not that good. How could you have liked it so much before? I’ve done this numerous times, but that is the power of the “Fan-favorite festival film.”

So I sat down with Azumi, expecting myself to be bored for most of its 2 hours. Surprisingly, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Unlike Kitamura’s previous big hit, Versus, it held up well after the second viewing. Azumi’s title character is a teenaged female assassin raised in the remote Japanese mountains during feudal times with a whole group of other teenaged assassins. They are kept isolated from society, and trained by their master to be ready to be called into action. They will eventually have to save the land from rampaging warlords by assassinating them before they can get started.

After the introduction to this situation (where we learn Azumi is one of the top students), the master calls on the students to do one final hideous test before he takes them into the towns to assassinate three warlords. They are paired up and must slay their partner in order to prove they have the emotional distance needed to become true assassins. After some nice tension and drama the remaining five are off on their mission.

The three warlords they must kill are interesting characters, and the various enemies the assassins meet along the way are fun and varied. And there are Ninjas! Azumi makes short work of them in awesome Kitamura style. Fun fun fun. The movie goes on like this for an hour and a half. And that’s a good thing. Some sub-plots move the action in different directions, but eventually it all leads down to Azumi vs. The head war-lord. The effeminate, pristinely white, rose-carrying, master swordsman. He is so funny and so over-the-top that you can’t help but be entertained. In fact, that is a great way to describe the final battle. Azumi fights her way through hundreds of enemies to get to
him, and the final confrontation takes place with some breathtaking sword and camera work.

No surprises, but who cares? Azumi is the type of film that gets your blood going. That’s what Kitamura is good at and that’s why people watch his films. The type of films where people get blood splattered all over the face no matter what part of the body they are stabbed in. The type of films that are so over the top that you can’t help but laugh and smile even though you may be cringing at the dialog. The type of films that make the 15 year-old boy in us happy. You can’t go wrong with Azumi, a film with a strong female character, ninjas, swords, spinning cameras, blood geysers, ninjas, Ryuhei Kitamura, swords, a feral ninja, acrobats, explosions, and of course, ninjas. If this comes anywhere near you in the theater, grab a bunch of your friends and go have some fun.