Samurai Spy

Saw Samurai Spy, the last of the samurai movies I'll see for a while. It followed a ninja (or is he a samurai??) who is caught up in the shadowy assassination plots and spy rings of two rival powers. The film is mostly boilerplate samurai stuff. There's the usual sword fights and goofy sidekicks and women who somehow cannot resist the charms of the sullen, scowling hero. Many samurai films have been adapted into westerns (Seven Samurai of course, and Yojimbo) but this one feels much more like a gangster film. Rather than being isolated and remote, as with the westerns, this film is too densely packed, with everyone on top of each other, always running into an agent or counter-agent.

The film is very shadowy, both in terms of plot and in terms of filming. The first glimpse of the protagonist we get is of him striding through the fog, flickering in and out of sight. We see the main characters often in silhouette, reduced to shadows. The characters are engaging in shadowy, hidden work and are thus, appropriately enough, most often found in shadows, or fading into the mist. Appropriately, the climax is at a masked carnival and the ending has the characters fighting in the fog once more.

The film was not that interesting to me. The shadowy cinematography shows up immediately and never goes anywhere. A lengthy pre-credits exposition overwhelmed me immediately. It explained who the two factions were and why they were fighting and who was the head of which but I think ultimately it doesn't matter that much. Man A is fighting man B. 'Nuff said. Unfortunately, this film spent a lot of time twisting the plot and revealing characters to be double/triple/quadruple agents. There were some nice high-speed camera shots, but it was a samurai film after all.