Saw Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, a samurai-sploitation film that feels like an origin story. The plot only exists to set up the main character, an ex-official executioner who has been betrayed and framed by a rival clan. All of this serves to get us to the image of a samurai accompanied by a baby boy. This man and his son walk the path, we are told in an opening narration, between the raging river of vengeance and the fires of honor (or something I wasn't really listening.)
This fire and river talk is not terribly important however since this is so much window-dressing for some kick-ass fight sequences with gushing fountains of bright red blood and quite a few pairs of tits. Indeed, one sign of the protagonist's samurai prowess is his ability to sexually preform under pressure. Samurai-sploitation.
The film is fairly fun but feels like it's trying to set up a series. There's no real resolution and the action is episodic. The scenes are neatly divided into back-story and present day. The back story reveals his motivations and the present day scenes are just him righteously kicking ass. His motivations are almost irrelevant. Kick-ass samurai with a little boy. That's really all you need to know.
I've decided in previous samurai films that the attitude of the film towards authority is the most interesting thing to examine. This one has a government official (the protagonist executioner) betrayed by other officials (the rival clan, which acts as a kind of spy network.) I get the feeling that the natural order of things as determined by the government is usurped and thus peace is thrown into chaos. This suggests a reverence for authority which is reinforced by their frequent use of crests and seals to show power. At one point our hero faces down a crowd of attackers simply by wearing the proper insignia on his robe.
The authority itself however is almost totally absent from the film. The government only appears as a series of official proclamations - one of which is sliced in two by the protagonist. There's an almost objectivist attitude, that a single man is allowed to buck the bureaucracy if he's powerful and clever enough. Of course he becomes a sort of tragic outcast as a result however.
Most of the samurai films I've seen have had almost a disdain for authority. Officials are meant to be assassinated most of the time. In this film however, the assassination attempt is frustrated. I feel this is the schlocky sort of film which implicitly believes that might makes right. There's some notion of virtue that the rival clan lacks but largely justice comes in the form of a beheading. I don't quite agree with this point of view, but it makes for a fairly fun film. So it's got that going for it.
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