Imagine it’s late summer and you’ve just picked up a new video game. You have three movements and two attacks that you use to kill a plethora of bad guys. You play the game for three hours and while you aren’t blown away by anything new, it’s exciting to explore this new world, characters, and mechanics before you go to sleep that night and never pick it up again.
That’s what watching Yûji Shimomura’s latest film Crazy Samurai Musashi is like, but not fun.
The film tells the story of Japan’s larger-than-life samurai and swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s legendary feat of eradicating 400 enemies at a time. The film opens with the Yoshioka Clan awaiting his arrival for a clearly unbalanced duel between the nine-year-old clan heir and Musashi. Musashi arrives and gets to work. The one-on-everyone battle is a 77-minute long, no-cuts (except for those made by the sword) single-take shot, with martial arts star Tak Sakaguchi in the lead role as Musashi slicing and dicing through the enemy clan for the entire grueling time, finally ending at the front gate – a journey of one square mile feeling like a thousand.
Unlike that hypothetical video game, Crazy Samurai Musashi offers you no upgrades, no special skins, and no sense of satisfaction after the defeat of the endlessly respawning enemies. The attitude of this film is primarily to present historical events and less of a narrative with any deeper meaning or story. I’ve been more impressed by history class lessons. There’s a lack of urgency that I wouldn’t normally expect from a one-take all-out battle samurai movie. That absence shows up in the slim-to-none narrative, the actual swordplay, and Mushashi himself. Musashi doesn’t move quickly, attack quickly, nor make much of an effort to really destroy the clan. He seems apathetic about the whole experience, despite Tak’s many identical close-ups showcasing the actor’s devilish grin as he dares the enemy to attack.
The narrative is too straight-forward and honestly boring. Maybe it’s the cultural dissonance of not knowing the full story of Musashi’s conquest up to this point, but being thrown into a movie where all we see is a one man bad-guy-killing machine is useless without a bit of context as to why he’s that way. The swordplay is impressive from a technical standpoint but due to the layout of this film, it gets empty and repetitive after the first ten minutes. Tak utilizes the same takedowns and finishing kills on all the henchmen that surround him over and over and I got to a point where I too felt I could perform them on my own roommate.
Technically, I was begging for something more impressive or interesting. The one-take film genre has grown tremendously in the past decade. I’m a huge fan of it when it is utilized well and for the benefit of the story. Even in action films (a la The Raid and John Wick), one-takes heighten the tension of a battle and the raw power of the hits being thrown. Musashi does none of this. Instead, the technique makes the movie drag longer and longer into oblivion. The action seems improvised and clunky instead of smooth and powerful. With no variation on his techniques or the locations for these fights, Musashi doesn’t seem impressive, but rather oppressive. The henchmen die and crawl just out of frame before circling back in line to get bopped on the head again. Musashi will stop for a water break at various houses in the clan village seemingly because Tak himself is actually thirsty. No tension is maintained except that between the audience and the arrival of the ending credits.
The moments this steel shines brightest are during those moments of variety and style. The introduction scene has cuts and is wonderfully tense as we await Musashi’s descent upon the unsuspecting clan. There are “boss fight” moments where Musashi engages in a sort of duel between a higher class of enemy and, although they are short-lived, they still kick more ass than Musashi had for the past 20-30 minutes prior to that battle. Even simple setting changes, such as walls being kicked down and opening up into a courtyard, feel invigorating. However, this sensation is short-lived as Musashi proceeds to stand in one spot to try and depose thirty of the same faces we’ve come to know over the course of the film.
If I needed any more convincing this movie was made in the least enjoyable way possible, the final two minutes of the film will do it. Seven years have passed and an original Yoshioka clan member who had escaped the massacre faces an older Musashi at a river bed alongside some other ronin and clansman still loyal to the now-ruined clan. This scene cuts from sword to sword and face to face as Musashi begins to cut his way through the remainder with an upgraded sword. This spectacularly shot and edited scene is pure bliss to watch. The filmmakers make you feel each cut of Old Musashi’s blade with interesting choreography and spectacular shot choices, even utilizing slow motion shots of clansmen falling into the river. It feels like such a good action movie and unique take on the samurai genre. But all it made me wonder was “Where was THIS guy at the whole time?” After seeing how Crazy Samurai Musashi could have been, it made me want those edits, power, and variety in the previous 77 minutes. I, for one, would have picked up that game again and again.
