Review of Zatichi on Filmviews.net
Year2003 ReviewerChris Docker
Zatoichi is the blind wanderer with a shock of blonde hair, a cane that transforms into a sword, and a legendary mastery of samurai warrior technique.
As a film, Zatoichi is distinctly oddball. It combines awesome and mesmerising martial arts, zany humour, varying types of beautifully performed Japanese dance, rhythms from everyday sounds, violent buffoonery, cross-dressing, beautifully depicted classical Japanese culture, wonderful cinematography and artery-popping gore.
If you are not too squeamish. Zatoichi is an unmissable feast. It's also subtitled, but as it's a very visual movie the minimal dialogue won't be a problem for you even if you tend to avoid anything other than English dialogue movies.
Zatoichi earns his living as a masseur and by a spot of gambling. Posing as a shuffling old man, it comes as a neat surprise (within the first few minutes and repeatedly throughout the movie) that he is a swordsman without parallel. He generally rights wrongs where he finds badness - and, as there is no shortage of badness, there is no shortage of baddies inventively split open in the delicate twinkling of an eye. We also encounter a cross-dressing orphan posing as a geisha, a mad neighbour posing as a samurai, and a plot-thickening bodyguard fighting to save his wife. They are woven into what is little short of a modern masterpiece of Japanese cinema from the diverse and accomplished Takeshi Kitano (who artistic career includes directing films like Battle Royale, acting in films as varied as Johnny Mnemonic and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, writing novels, winning major awards and being a cult figure of Japanese television.)
Rating: 9/10;