Saw Samurai Assassin, another samurai film. True to form, this one also involved a conspiracy to murder a government official. However, it seems there's a mole in the assassination conspiracy. Who is the mole? Can it be the protagonist, a rough-mannered and penniless ronin, looking to make his name, or could it be the rich conspirator, who spends his days studying poetry and the blade in his mansion? I had my suspicions going in, but I won't spoil it for you.
This one also featured surprising family connections, gold-hearted geishas, and impossibly intricate clan/dojo/government schemes. Everyone is spying on everyone and I couldn't follow who these people were most of the time.
There's some obscure references to the changing times. The rich conspirator claims his motivation to be "readying Japan for the future" and talks of English and American trading vessels. The man who they want to assassinate also talks of himself being the only man who can usher samurais into the next era. Something's being referenced here if not outright commented on.
As you might guess, this one left me fairly cold. This at least partly my fault (I couldn't follow parts of the plot and didn't try to especially.) but also the film itself is very true-to-genre and cliche-riddled. It wasn't cliche-ed enough that I could predict plot points, but nothing really broke out of the rigid samurai-assassinates-a-government-employee mold (which I did not even know was a thing before I started on this list of samurai films.) I feel like I've seen all of these parts before.
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