Crazy Samurai Musashi (2020)

There are films that earn their place in cinema history through sheer audacity of concept, and Crazy Samurai Musashi (2020) is, at least on paper, one of them. The film draws on one of the most celebrated episodes in Japanese legend: the story of Miyamoto Musashi, the seventeenth-century swordsman whose life has been fictionalised so many times across novels, manga, film and television that he has become something close to a national myth. Here, the focus falls on a specific flashpoint, the confrontation at the Ichijoji Tree in 1604, in which Musashi supposedly faced down a vast combined force of the Yoshioka clan and their hired fighters. The film's selling point, plastered right there in the tagline, is that 77 of its 92 minutes are presented as a single, unbroken take: one man, one sword, 400 opponents. As a gimmick, it is either brilliantly committed or utterly reckless, and probably a bit of both.

The film was directed by Yuji Shimomura, a filmmaker who came up through the Japanese action industry as a stunt coordinator and action director, and whose background in choreographed combat is clearly the engine driving the whole project. Produced by My Theater D.D., it is very much a genre piece built around a single technical ambition rather than a conventional narrative. The lead role of Musashi is taken by Tak Sakaguchi, a cult figure in Japanese action cinema whose physicality and screen presence are well established in that world. Kento Yamazaki, Yousuke Saito, Ben Hiura and Arata Yamanaka round out the principal cast, though given the nature of the film's central set piece, characterisation is fairly secondary to the choreography. For anyone who has followed Japanese action cinema, or who has enjoyed the kind of sustained, punishment-heavy fight filmmaking seen in something like The Raid 2 or the elegant wire-work of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this film arrives with a reasonable amount of expectation behind it. Whether that expectation is rewarded is, of course, the question.

The film sits within a wider tradition of Japanese genre cinema that values physical performance and historical setting in roughly equal measure, a tradition that stretches back well before modern action filmmaking and takes in everything from classical chambara pictures to contemporary genre work (the Mononoke films being a recent, rather different example of Japan's ongoing appetite for period-set storytelling). The single-take conceit places it in a fairly small category of films that have staked their entire identity on a technical feat, which is an exciting place to stake your flag, but also an exposed one. It asks the audience to forgive a lot in the name of the achievement, and that is a contract that requires the execution to hold up at every point.

The intro 15 minutes is better than the entire rest of the film. An entire single take dispatching of hundreds of extras just does not work. It looks shoddy. It looks shit. I'm sorry but this film was a great idea but a completely failed execution

I think that says it all, really. The idea of a single unbroken take covering that kind of sustained action is the sort of thing you hear about and immediately want to see, and for a short while the film earns that excitement. But there is a reason most filmmakers edit: cuts give you pace, tension, angles, relief. Strip those away for over an hour and you need the choreography, the staging and the energy to fill every single second, and here it simply cannot. For me, the whole exercise ends up feeling less like a bold artistic choice and more like a dare that nobody thought hard enough about before saying yes. Good ideas deserve better than this.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2020  | Watched: 2025-05-18

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Crazy Samurai Musashi (2020) on YouTube

Where to watch

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