Movies: Azumi

The opening and first thirty to forty minutes are the best parts of the movie. Ex-samurai Jiji (reliable Yoshio Harada, looking even more grizzled than ever) takes in an assortment of orphans and raises them in seclusion as his own little clan of kinder-killers. Azumi is the star pupil, the fastest and deadliest, but when she’s not slicing off arms she’s a rather ordinary, dreamy (shilling for vacuous) young girl. By the time they’re all in their teens, Jiji declares them ready for the outside world, but first they have to pass one crucial test. Each is to pair off with the one they like the most — and kill them.

This particular scene is, in a way, a key to understanding the problem with Azumi. At core it’s a schmaltzy teen movie, stuck somewhere between bloodshed and bubblegum. Por ejemplo: How many changes of fashionably blue-dyed outfit does Azumi have, given that she douses them in blood almost every twenty minutes on the clock? Or what about the endless “last stand” death scenes, padded out to interminable length using syrupy slow motion, until they approach unintentional self-parody?

Jiji’s mission is to have his killers take out three warlords who are threatening to destabilize the newfound peace in Japan. They tear into the first of their assignments with gusto, but the more they see of the outside world (and the more their ranks are thinned out), the deeper their doubts grow. There’s an emotional turning point of sorts when the gang bump into the lovely Yae (Aya Okamoto, who voiced Miyuki in Tokyo Godfathers), a leader of an acrobat troupe, who for them symbolizes how the outside world can be something other than a slaughterhouse. When Yae’s friends are mistaken for the assassins and slaughtered, the fellowship breaks, and Azumi goes in pursuit of Yae’s tormentors. The climax is one mammoth fight, with Azumi squaring off against literally hundreds of enemies in the proverbial wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Azumi’s gang have the usual assortment of colorful enemies — like Saru (“Monkey”) (Minoru Matsumoto), an enemy ninja whose schtick is that he dresses and acts like a primate, complete with howls and hoots. We’re also treated to the Sajiki Brothers (Kenichi Endo, Kazuya Shimizu, and Tak Sakaguchi), none of whom feel pain…much. My favorite of the bad guys is Bijomaru (Jō Odagiri), a tall, willowy-haired and bloodthirsty bishonen who looks like he stepped off the cover of a Gackt album. But as adversaries, they’re remarkably underwhelming; instead of being genuine menaces, they’re just goofy. The actors, including Ueto herself, are generally good, but they’re at the mercy of a movie that mistakes being busy with being interesting.

Azumi was directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, an overnight sensation the world over for his outlandish zombie/yakuza/criminal/time-traveling mini-epic Versus. I liked Versus because Kitamura was willing to do absolutely anything to get the audience to keep watching. At one point he has a point-blank gun battle between the hero and the villain, and then flash-cuts to a bunch of bullets hitting the ground, all fused head-to-head. Inspired. Here, he makes express use of a bigger budget: there’s one moment during a climactic fight where we’re going in a three-hundred-sixty-degree circle over and under the combatants, and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how it was achieved. He also lays on the CGI and stuntwork in various combinations, but the results often look forced and clumsy instead of breathtaking.

Given how the movie is aimed at teens, I wondered if there wasn’t an allegory to be found between Kitamura’s kid assassins and modern Japanese youth. Think about it: They’re schooled mercilessly into putting their personal lives aside for the sake of their jobs, their marriages and their children, but feelings still bleed through, and sometimes in rather ugly ways. If they’d been smarter about that point, instead of getting bogged down in endless fight scenes, they might really have had something here. Not that the appeal to youth seemed to make much difference, as the film laid an egg commercially and was only rescued from the franchise scrapheap by a strong showing on home video.

Chanbara movies, like any other genre, enjoy periodic rebirths and rediscoveries when fresh new directors bring old standards up to date for the current generation of audiences. Samurai movies have already gone through several such waves in Japan: the early years of Japanese cinema which were little more than filmed plays; the postwar rebirth; the saturation of the market in the Seventies with serials like Hissatsu!; the big decline and slide into near-irrelevance; and the current rebirth. The newest crop of such films seem to owe a debt to comics and video games, but are also being slyly targeted at younger audiences: other than Azumi, Samurai Fiction and The Princess Blade come to mind, but the other thing they all seem to have in common is that they’re just not very good.

And now the final gripe. Like so many other big action movies these days, Azumi isn’t satisfied with having just one ending. It gives us something like five, where a final clash turns into another final clash which leads to another final clash, which leads to a revelation which leads to an epilogue which leads to … you guessed it … the doorway to a sequel. It’s been said that no good movie can be too long, and no bad one too short. If Azumi is any good, it’s in spite of its length and not thanks to it.