Crazy Samurai Musashi | aka Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 (2020) Review

“Crazy Samurai Musashi” Theatrical Poster

Director: Yuji Shimomura
Cast: Tak Sakaguchi, Kento Yamazaki, Yousuke Saito, Ben Hiura, Arata Yamanaka, Fuka Hara, Kosei Kimura, Nobu Morimoto, Akihiko Sai, Masaaki Takarai
Running Time: 92 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Crazy Samurai Musashi is one of those movies that’s journey to the screen is just as interesting as the movie itself, spanning over 10 years before it eventually arrived in 2020. Initially announced as a collaboration between Japanese action icon Tak Sakaguchi (here once more billed as Tak ∴, as he was in Re:Born) and auteur director Sono Sion in 2009, Blood of the Wolves was intended to be a genre mash-up containing elements of chanbara, kung fu, monsters, and zombies. The pairing of Japan’s leading action star and most distinctive director was an exciting one, however 2 years later there was still no sign of it, and in 2011 it was announced the project was now going under the name Kenkichi.

By this point Takaguchi and his stunt team had been training for a year so that they could execute what was planned to be an ambitious 10-minute single take action scene. While Sion had been attached to Blood of the Wolves in the capacity of scriptwriter, by the time Kenkichi came around he was credited as being co-director along with Sakaguchi himself. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way Sion dropped out, and the production was left with a leading man and action team primed and ready with nowhere to go.

Rather than cutting their losses and calling it a day, with a full production crew at his disposal Sakaguchi decided to expand the 10-minute one take scene to 77 minutes, and worry about the plot later. An epic feat regardless of how much preparation has been put into it, the fact that the decision was taken almost on the fly and still came to fruition is amazing in itself. While the one take shot was completed, with no plot attached to it the footage then sat on a shelf for a further 7 years, before in 2018 a campaign was setup on the Japanese crowdfunding site Campfire. The campaign was successful, with the funds used to shoot additional scenes (a pair of plot establishing sequences directed by Yuji Shimomura that bookend the one take), add audio, and use CGI to add blood splatter. Finally, in 2020 Sakaguchi’s epic one-taker arrived in the form of Crazy Samurai Musashi.

Miyamoto Musashi was in fact a real swordsman, and has been portrayed onscreen several times before, most famously by the legendary Toshiro Mifune in director Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy. While Mifune’s portrayal was intended to be a biographical take on Musashi’s life, the angle taken in Crazy Samurai Musashi is pure pulp fiction, similar more in tone to his appearances in the likes of Kinji Fukasaku’s Samurai Reincarnation and Ryuhei Kitamura’s Aragami. While the US re-title goes under the name Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1, Sakaguchi’s total kill count over the course of 90 minutes is the even more gratuitous 588. How that translates onscreen is of course key to if the final product can be said to be an entertaining piece of cinema, so it makes sense to start off with the good.

In an age of digital trickery (see the one-take in Extraction for a classic example), Crazy Samurai Musashi’s one-take is legitimately a continuous 77-minute shot with no hidden cuts or post-digital blending. From someone who’s a fan of the action genre, the feat in itself is impressive, and the clearly visible exhaustion that exudes from Sakaguchi towards the latter stages of the sequence blur the line between reality and acting in a way which feels exciting and new. Incorporating a number of short water breaks only adds to the realism of what we’re witnessing, very much allowing the audience to relate to what Sakaguchi must be feeling. We know it’s a movie, however the sweat covered face and heavy panting is 100% real, conveying a sense of immediacy which is authentic purely because it’s not being acted.

The camera also gets increasingly confident as the take progresses, from staying a safe distance from the action in the initial confrontations, to getting in amongst it later on, taking the viewer very much into the middle of the scuffle. The take was clearly shot as the sun was setting, and there’s one fantastic shot towards the end where the camera pans to a close-up of Sakaguchi’s exhausted face while the sun sets in the background, casting glare across the frame in a rare moment of beauty amidst the killing.

On the not so good end of the spectrum there’s a number of flaws. The biggest one is the fact that it’s the same 20 – 30 stuntmen playing the army of samurai that Sakaguchi has to take on. As most scenes seem to involve him needing to face off against 100 of them, they need to play multiple attackers within the same scene. This proves problematic for a variety of reasons, first being the way that whenever someone is killed, rather than fall to the ground they need to awkwardly run off the screen, circle around behind the camera, and then jump back into the fray in the background. Apart from the fact that reacting to being sliced to death by running doesn’t seem all that natural, the fact that there’s no costume change resulting in the exact same person showing up again (sometimes mere seconds later) really takes you out of the moment.

This issue is confounded further with some of the wide lensing used in the early stages, in which it looks like the decision was taken that it’d be less obvious for any fallen samurai to stagger into the background than try to find a way offscreen. Unfortunately here less obvious is still very obvious, with certain attackers staggering to the back of the pack having been killed, then simply turning around and re-joining the fray. The side effect of this approach of course is that, no matter how many victims fall to Sakaguchi’s sword, there’s always a distinct lack of bodies lying on the ground. One guy with a distinctive appearance thanks to his mop of hair I swear gets killed over 20 times, sometimes within a few seconds of his last death, and always through the hungry hippo-esque technique of being ‘bopped’ on the head with Sakaguchi’s blade.

Which brings us to the choreography itself. Handled by action director Isao Karasawa (Tokyo Gore Police, Helldriver), the goal was clearly to aim for a sense of realism, with Sakaguchi limited to around 10 strikes and the occasional kick, while the enemies for the most part remain as blade fodder. There can be no denying that the nature of the sword action quickly becomes repetitive, with the goal here being more of survival and endurance than anything flashy. Even the introduction of a character that brandishes a chain with a sickle attached fails to bring any additional variety, with their confrontation ending just as quickly as the endlessly regenerating samurais. While the effort is admirable, as a piece of cinema there are parts of Crazy Samurai Musashi that feel as gruelling for the viewer as Sakaguchi was probably feeling onscreen. But then, that could be the point. 

Proceedings close with a final scene that takes place 7 years later, which is notably also a true representation of the time between filming (it’s also clear from Sakaguchi’s appearance that the scene was filmed at a different time than the single take sequence). With the clan that Sakaguchi almost completely wiped out still on his tail, they finally catch up to him on the banks of a river, and we’re treated to an action sequence which shows a speed and ferocity that’s been absent from the preceding 80 minutes we’ve just witnessed. Ironically, it’s this final scene which proves the point that physically demanding action scenes are best created with an approach of quality over quantity. For this reviewer at least, I’ll take 2 minutes of intensely choreographed mayhem over 77 minutes of endurance. An admirable effort, but admiration and entertainment don’t always go hand in hand.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5.5/10