Sasaki Kojiro

This film, starring Nakadai Tatsuya as Musashi and Onoe as Kojiro, is very visually driven. Throughout its long runtime, the film takes our strong-willed, and fickle Kojiro from his hometown, to Okinawa, through raids, festivals, and a final battle on a sandy beach.

The acting was fine. There is not much of Musashi in this movie, so if you are wishing only to see their climactic battles, look elsewhere in Inagaki's list of films. I was surprised many times at the turns and new developments within the film. Inagaki definitely took artistic liberty, as I have never heard of such things in Kojiro's life before-and I was fine with it. Inagaki did a great job.

The only problem I did have with the film involved some fight choreography. At the same time that some great stuff was coming out of Japan, fight-wise, this film was driven more by its plot. In that manner, the fights were a bit neglected.

I will most likely watch this film again. Many, many, many films around this time take place in inns, buildings, gray towns, or Shogunate offices, and this film was a great departure into the colorful.

Movies should, at all costs, avoid being boring and too long. Kojiro is both of those things, and not even a little Tatsuya Nakadai near the end can do much to save it. He's one of my favourite actors of all time, and he's not in this for the first 95% of the movie. I can't deny it was fun seeing him for one brief fight scene near the end, but it certainly wasn't worth sitting through the rest of the movie for what amounted to a cameo.

This is probably the least interesting old-school samurai movie I've ever watched. I'm usually forgiving of flaws in these kinds of movies and find something to enjoy, but this one was just too long and too dull for much enjoyment to be had. It scores some points for looking okay visually and technically containing some Tatsuya Nakadai, but other than that, it was quite bad.