Violent, great soundtrack, and full of action.This movie has a good story This movie has good music This movie is bloody as hell This movie has an evil villain This movie has emotion This movie has a sexy asian woman lead This movie is awesome

There are certain types of movies you watch, each with their own conventions that over time audiences have grown to accept. For example, we know that explosions in space don't actually create noise, but for the sake of the movie, an audible "bang" increases the experience. Or in horror movies, no matter how fast or far a victim runs, the killer always ends up ahead of them. As in those cases, Japanese or Chinese etc films have their own idiosyncrasies, such as ninjas or samurai being able to defy gravity and all natural laws of physics, and no matter how cut up and injured they are, they can still manage to put up a pretty good fight despite exceptional blood loss. Unfortunately, I've never learned to accept or enjoy these particular conventions and Azumi has this very same nonsense in spades.Set during the Japanese feudal period or Sengoku period in the late 1500's & early 1600's, Azumi as a young girl is found kneeling beside her dead mother by a master swordsman and a group of kids. The Swordsman, Gessai, takes her with him and over time he trains all of them to be master assassins. Fast forward a number of years and we learn that there are 10 students who are now in their late teens and are ready for a "mission" that they have been training for all their lives. As their final test, they are asked to pair up and then kill their partner. The remaining 5, are then considered ready and fully indoctrinated as assassins to start their mission.Gessai and his 5 assassins have been tasked with liquidating 3 feudal warlords by the Tokugawa Shogunate in the hope that Japan will finally unify under one rule answerable only to the emperor and thereby end years of unrelenting civil war that threatens to destroy the country. Throughout the movie, the band succeed in killing 2 of the warlords and intermixed on their journey are constant conflicts and skirmishes with various other bandits and marauders. By the end of their journey only 2 of the assassins are left, Azumi and Nagara, and this leads us into the sequel to track down the third and last on the list. While the Sengoku period was a real event in Japans history and the 3 warlords or Daimyo were also real people, none of them were actually assassinated, the story of Azumi is purely fictional and while I can accept that I'm not watching a documentary, I can't help but feel that I'm not watching anything other than over- acted nonsense. Despite the flurry of katana and various other period style weapons, every fight is reminiscent of a Power Rangers episode and just as laughable and poorly acted. In many instances, swords are cutting off arms and heads etc but remain free of blood. Actors faces are constantly getting spattered with blood, but never on their clothes or hair and getting stabbed always seems to result in blood spurting out like a burst water main. I gave this movie a go as I was hoping that Asian cinema may have matured and these ridiculous conventions would have been dispensed with, but sadly that's not the case. The worst part in this is that NO ONE CAN ACT! There is absolutely no actor in this with any ability at all and I've seen better acting in soap operas. Even with the extended fight sequences, innumerable deaths, copious amounts of blood, explosions and various assorted violence, Azumi is an example of what happens when you make a movie and fill it with idiots who have no idea how to be directed. Everybody is nothing more than a bad cartoon in a 3 Stooges flick. Throughout the movie, characters commented on how beautiful Azumi was yet for me she spent the whole time with the dopey expression of a deer caught in headlights on her face and for a master assassin who has spent her whole life training for this one goal, she seems very easily distracted. I still don't get why one person with a sword is attacked by dozens of enemies also with swords one by one. I didn't understand it in Kill Bill and I don't get it in this. Attack the intruder en masse and no matter how good they are, they don't stand a chance. Problem solved. By the end of the movie the 2nd warlord has managed to escape out to sea when Azumi turns up to wreak havoc, yet she manages to miraculously appear on board ship somehow, (bone dry I might add), kills the feudal lord and then dives overboard before any one can move against her. When we see her again, she's back at the warlord camp where practically everybody has been killed, reunites with Nagara who "survived" an explosion with only a few cuts and scrapes and I kick myself for having sat through over 2 hours of the biggest waste of time since Twilight. This is really only for fans of the genre as for anyone else it'll be torture for the senses.

I guess I'm in the category of people love Versus, but find the director's other movies to be a bit tedious, boring, and overly stylistic, while lacking substance. While Versus had style to spare, it didn't take itself seriously, and it was so over-the-top and surreal that it's difficult to believe that someone could actually criticize the lack of story or the excessive violence. Azumi, on the other hand, seems to alternate between Versus-style camp and truly taking itself very seriously (usually degenerating into ridiculous melodrama that made me laugh more than the campy scenes). The idea that these undisciplined children could cut down legions of trained samurai was just plain silly. While I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for a comic book movie, I'd prefer the action sequences to be less inspired by Michael Bay. Characters pose, pose, attack, then pose. Sometimes they don't even bother to attack until they've posed for so long, you wonder if they've turned into wood. I might even be able to handle all this, except that it's all set to the worst soundtrack ever.The visuals are very pretty, and the action scenes are actually pretty competently done when the director isn't obsessed with posing his actors like dolls. The characters are stereotypes, with relatively simplistic morality guiding each of them. Still, it's better than what you see in many action movies, where the morality boils down to a good guy and a bad guy; instead, we get clichéd, stereotypical shades of grey. Given the ages of the leads, I'm guessing that this was actually targeted at a younger demographic, who will be deeply impressed with the simplistic displays of morality.I've heard good things about some of Ryuhei Kitamura's other movies, so I'll probably still check them out, despite my reaction to Azumi. As I understand it, none of them are especially similar to Versus, which probably means that I'll have the same reaction. Still, you never know if you'll like something until you give it a chance.

this movie was absolutely terrible, it reminded me of a bad episode of power rangers extended to the length of a full movie with gore. it lacked a coherent story, and good acting. the camera angles were all messed up with the worst being a 360 degree pan around Azumi while she was fighting an insane bad guy with absolutely no back story except for the fact that his sword had no hand-guard because he didn't defend. characters randomly resurrect from the dead. the wire work is obvious and so is the green screen used in the first also the movie moves along at a snails pace which is really aggravating to see in a movie that is supposed to be action packed.