Mumon

I was expecting something terrible because of the reviews, but it ended up being pretty good. A movie about a ninja portrayed by Satoshi Ono? You could never have expected it to be a fully serious affair. The fighting and dramatic scenes are interspersed with slapstick and lightheartedness, but they aren’t hurting anything. The only drawback is the unnecessarily long running time. It could easily have been even fifteen or twenty minutes shorter and we wouldn’t have missed anything. I wasn't really interested in the film at the beginning, I felt like I’d been tossed in among so many characters and their many goals and desires. Of course, as time went on things got clearer, we got rid of some of the characters and started to focus more on fewer of them. We get it all in this film: vicious fights, cruelty, lightheartedness, love, misunderstanding, and hard knocks, and it's pretty nicely mixed together. In essence, this is no historical film, it has nothing to do with it – above all in how it is shot, how the story flows, and how the characters express themselves. A similar story set in the streets of contemporary Tokyo would work the same way. Essentially a modern battle over nothing with everything set during the Warring States period. A cool movie. A weaker 4 stars. (18/03/2018)