Fantasia Review: 'Crazy Samurai Musashi’ Grows Old Fast
The centerpiece of Crazy Samurai Musashi is a single, unbroken, 77 minute one-take depicting the legendary warrior, Miyamoto Musashi, fight 588 adversaries in battle. After killing the next heir to the thrown, a clan deploys every soldier at their disposal to extract revenge. Wave after wave, enemy after enemy, they pursue Musashi, but despite their efforts, they are no match for the gifted swordsman. Surely such a fabled story should warrant an equally legendary film to match, right?
It is true the tale warrants intrigue, but unfortunately the technical merit backing Crazy Samurai Musashi comes up short. Cardinal among these flaws is the film’s lack of endurance. At the ten minute mark you move out of the film’s opening sequence — a sequence consisting of multiple camera angles, several cuts, and high fidelity video as seen in traditional filmmaking— and into the one-take, but by minute fourteen you quickly realize that the next seventy-three minutes will unfortunately be a hyper-redundant slog that will test your patience.
Much of this has to do with the cyclical and repetitive nature of the battle. Enemies surround Musashi in a circular pattern. They advance. They die. They flail off screen. And the back row of enemies fill in gaps. Occasionally, Musashi will back into, or walks out of, an area to trigger a ‘boss battle’ or take one of many water breaks — of which bamboo water bottles are conveniently stored throughout the abandoned village — before a new wave of enemies is launched. It very much has the feel of a video game, and it grows old very quickly.
It isn’t helped by redundant fight choreography that leaves plenty of pauses in the action , nor is it supported by a floating steady-cam that looks as if it was filmed on a dated digital video recorder. When you have 588 people to kill, it can’t all be different, but truthfully, it felt as if the combat was improvised in the moment and the actors are waiting to see if they or the person next to them will make the next move, perhaps lending itself to the sluggish pace of action that sorely misses a sense of urgency.
All of this comes off as rather confusing because the ending scene — which contains a brief choreographed action sequence — looks much better than the 77 minute one-take. It’s more fluid, more energetic, and exudes a higher overall quality. Between this and the aforementioned opening, one has to wonder why the rest of the film wasn’t executed like this.
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