Dolby Digital 5.1 (Japanese)

This was the final of Miramax 4 martial arts classics released as a collection or separately on Blu-ray. The collection featured some extraordinary action and top line star power for the most part. Zatoichi, for the most part, is the weakest of the four films. It is almost a solo effort by renowned Japanese actor Takeshi Kitano. He participated in writing the script. He is also the director, editor, and star of this rather off the wall martial arts film. The character of Zatoichi has appeared in many films and is as much a part of martial arts culture as Jackie Chan. Kitano does quite a superb job in portraying the blind swordsman, but it is in the other areas that he falls considerably short of the intended mark. Instead of reaching for the classic staples of the genre, he decides to take this tale in a far more fantastical direction. Swords blaze with such speed it’s impossible to really appreciate the skills, because you never actually see the sword. It’s out, slice and dice, and resheathed all in a blink of an eye. Rather impressive the first 20 times it occurs in the film, but before long it’s merely an old punch line that’s been repeated one too many times by a desperate comedian who doesn’t really have anything else. It’s sad, really. Because, Kitano does have something else to offer, and we certainly get glimpses of that. In the end, however, Kitano pushes the boundaries too often for me to take this film seriously at all.

The film is really a Western guised in the form of a martial arts film. The plot rings of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter. When a blind masseur wonders into a village, he finds that it has been terrorized by a gang that extorts shop owners for protection and runs the local gambling and geisha houses. The blind drifter has startling skill with a sword he hides sheathed in his seeing eye cane. He has an uncanny ability to hear enough from his environment to counter any blow raised toward him and cut up his opponent quickly and quite efficiently. He meets up with Genosuke (Asano) who supplies the comic relief here. Genosuke is a degenerate gambler who can’t seem to catch a break in the local dice parlor. But he is impressed with the uncanny ability the masseur has of hearing the correct lay of the dice. The two of them clean up at the game. Deciding to spend some of their winnings at the geisha house, the pair meet two geisha girls who are actually more than meets the eye. They are the sole surviving children of a family slaughtered by the mob kingpin running the local gang. Together they plot to discover the identity of the boss and rid the village of the gang forever. The gang has employed the services of a very skilled samurai to enforce their will on the people. It doesn’t take much time to figure out that all of this is leading to a wild west style showdown between the samurai and the masseur.