The flick's real title is "The Gunslingers", although what gunslingers we have here would draw derision.
Let's see, let's take the 'gunslinger' description and see how it matches. I have viewed dozens of gunfighting movies, all the way back beginning with the 1960's. I recall how awed I was then with Yul Brynner's "The Magnificent Seven", and that passion for gunfighting movies continued throughout my adolescence, with every single one of Clint Eastwood's, title after title of the Italian "spaghetti" westerns, including all of the Django, Sartana, Gringo,....well, the list is quite long. But compared to this one, those movies WERE movies, cheesy and poorly filmed as most were. There was some plot you could follow, most of the time, and the filming, although perhaps not the best, could be mentally and physically understood and followed.
But this one is almost a disgrace to the gunfighting theme. There was no real theme that you could say could be understood. The hero does not join any band. Rather, those that were with him - and you'd have to stretch your imagination a bit to understand who's with who here, everything was a jumping around between scenes, suddenly focusing one character you don't know where it came from, and then another, and another - were not following anybody really. The girl Azumi was seeking revenge for the death of her sister; that was the only thing that stuck to my mind. The rest was a confusing morass of subplots and turns that made no sense.
I didn't see any gunslingers, just a bunch of people who shot each other like children in a playground. I didn't know guns when shot sounded like firecrackers. I just wonder who wrote the synopsis of this story, because I must say if this isn't a blatant attempt to dress up one of the worst movies made, I don't know what is.
There are no lessons or morals that stand out here, nothing so significant as 'greed doesn't pay' or some-such. Everybody for some reason is after some gold, no one knows why or how that gold got there, and to tell the truth, there was no gold. Just the bad guys holding up some black triangular shiny rock.
I'll tell you the ecstasy I felt with this one: I dozed off a couple of times. During those few minutes of blissfully floating in the dark ethereal, it came to me that this is the only ecstasy I will experience during these 90 minutes. But of course if you are in the mood for bad experiences, then you might find 'Ecstasy of Gold' a.k.a. 'The Gunslingers' right up your alley.
