THE AISLE SEAT - by Mike McGranaghan
"BUSHIDO MAN: SEVEN DEADLY BATTLES"
If you combined Jiro Dreams of Sushi with a Jackie Chan movie, you'd end up with something akin to Bushido Man: Seven Deadly Battles. A cult favorite in Japan, the movie also garnered love at the 2013 Fantasia International Film Festival, a Canadian celebration of genre cinema. Now Americans will have the chance to discover this quirky martial arts flick. It's hitting our shores via Blu-Ray and DVD from Shout! Factory on June 10.
Our hero is Toramaru (Mitsuki Koga), a Japanese warrior returning from a pilgrimage. He agrees to relate tales of the seven battles he took part in to his trainer, Master Gensai (Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi). Each tale is preceded by Toramaru explaining what he ate prior to the fight. We see him lovingly preparing his meals in flashback. This act follows his philosophy, which is “know the enemy by eating his food.” In the battles, Toramaru fights in a number of disciplines, including kung fu, nunchaku, stick, and sword. Master Gensai listens to each tale with great anticipation, pleased that his pupil has garnered such a wide array of skills.
The fights in Bushido Man start off straightforwardly, then grow increasingly elaborate and crazy as the movie rolls on. Director Takanori Tsujimoto and action choreographer Kensuke Sonomura have clearly taken great care to make each one distinct and interesting. Sometimes, the fights have a comical twist, other times they're full of bloody rage. All of them are exceptionally well done, once again proving that well-executed martial arts moves are not unlike ballet, except that ballet rarely has anyone getting a limb ripped off at the end.
Aside from being a skillfully-made tribute to the various styles of fighting, Bushido Man seems also to be a journey through the entirety of martial arts cinema. It begins with the traditional “two guys fighting in a dusty field” style, then moves on to more contemporary settings and adds some humor, in the vein of Jackie Chan's mid-career efforts. One sequence, in which Toramaru fights a Yakuza, calls to mind John Woo/Chow Yun-Fat pictures such as Hard Boiled. Bushido Man ends with the kind of science fiction-ish fight we've seen in some recent cutting edge Asian action pictures. This one involves a “bullet arm” that fires when the person wearing it punches. Anyone even remotely versed in Asian cinema will delight in this loving homage to the genre's changing face.
And you know those “credit cookies” we seem to get on every other movie these days? Bushido Man perfectly satirizes them. It may have the best credit cookie concept ever.
The movie's main flaw should be obvious: there's almost no story here. It's merely an 88-minute assemblage of fight sequences, loosely tied together by very thin connective tissue. Because Toramaru has made it through his battles, there's no suspense as to whether he survives any of them, and aside from his passion for food, he doesn't really have any other defining characteristics. For as cool as the fight sequences are, they'd be even better with more substance around them.
In the end, it all depends on what you're looking for. If you want a gripping story to go with your martial arts mayhem, Bushido Man: Seven Deadly Battles won't quite satisfy your craving. If you just want to sit back, relax, and admire some undeniably kick-ass combat, it definitely has the goods.
An 11-minute look at the movie's premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival is the sole bonus feature.
For more information on this title, please visit the Shout! Factory website.
(
1/2 out of four)
Bushido Man: Seven Deadly Battles is unrated, but contains martial arts violence and some blood/gore. The running time is 1 hour and 28 minutes.
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