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Azumi

2003, Movie, NR, 128 mins

Azumi: Review

AZUMI
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VERSUS director Ryuhei Kitamura's adaptation of Azumi, the popular long-running manga series, remains faithful to its highly regarded source with an intelligent script, clever -- if often cruel -- visual flourishes, and thrillingly staged fight sequences. Disgusted by the ongoing violence among grasping warlords whose battles have torn his nation apart, 19th-century shogun Lord Tokugawa charges Master Gessai (Yoshiro Harada) to assemble a team of crack assassins and train them to exterminate every last troublemaker. Gessai, who lost his beloved son on a battlefield fighting the rancorous Toyotomi Allies, recruits 10 young orphans, including the strong, lightning-fast Azumi (Aya Ueto), and raises them in isolation in a remote part of the mountain. Ten years later the team is nearly ready for its mission, but Master Gessai first asks each to choose his or her closest companion from among the rest and, in a brutal test of unquestioning dedication, battle that person to the death. Reluctantly they comply, and once the slaughter has ended and the bodies of the fallen buried, Azumi and the other survivors are finally ready to leave the mountain and embark on their highly secretive mission: eliminating three particularly troublesome warlords who refuse to accept the defeat of the Toyotomi. As these highly trained killers move ever closer to their targets, Master Gessai orders them to ignore the bandit raids and village massacres they witness throughout the countryside; their swords, he reminds them, are to be used only for the task ahead. Horrified but rendered helpless, Azumi begins to question whether the men she's been trained to kill truly deserve their fate, and wonders what her life might have been like had she not been recruited by Master Gessai. Meanwhile, targeted warlord Kiyomasa Kato (Naoto Takenaka) is determined to thwart the assassins' plans by killing the killers first, and secures the release of imprisoned Bijomaru Mogami (Joe Odagiri), a rouged, rose-sniffing psycho swordsman who delights in the destruction of human life. Azumi's developing morality and general questions about cycles of violence and the necessity of killing make this a far more interesting film than the popular VERSUS, which combined martial-arts action and zombie gore with relentless repetitiveness. But don't worry: AZUMI features more than enough thrilling wirework, slow and agonizing deaths, and blood-spattered faces to please even the most discriminating fans of the genre. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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