Crazy Samurai Musashi (2020) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by matt lynch ★½

  Like watching a Renaissance Fair reenactment shot on someone's phone.

• Review by More_Badass ★★ 1

  Some dos-&-donts advice for any burgeoning filmmakers looking to riff on or one-up this

  DON’T have your lead stand in the same spot for approximate twenty minutes, haphazardly whacking away at bored swordsmen

  DO have those bored swordsmen attack with more varied tactics than “suicidally charge into blade” and “wave sword around while shuffling back and forth”

  DON’T assume the audience knows who your legendary character is and thus spend all of five minutes setting up narrative artifice

  DON’T rely so completely on your gimmicky concept that your hero is reduced to the equivalent of disembodied puppet-strings swinging a katana around

  DO watch Tokuzo Tanaka’s The Betrayal for a far more effective showcase of how to deliver a grueling, tactically-diverse,…

• Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★½ 5

  An essay on killing. Very good exercise on anti-mythmaking. It depicts the most famous battle of Miyamoto Musashi samurai career when he killed over 500 men in detail. It has a traditional prologue and epilogue, but the bulk of the film is one continuous 75 minute shot in which Musashi goes around butchering a nameless horde of enemies, but it is pretty much the opposite of silly showy stuff like tht big Extraction one take, as it isn't played for spectacle but for the drudgery of killing. Huge chunks of it involves Tak Sakaguchi standing around as people go after him. The cinematography is plain, the camera moments of fancy are not to play up the choireography but Musashi's exhaustion.…

• Review by comrade_yui ★

  this whole fucking movie is like having someone play arkham city on easy mode and then forcing you for an hour to see them slowly counter-attack a legion of thugs who only strike one at a time, and you're saying to yourself, 'well, isn't that a movie cliche that we all accept? a bunch of bad guys who only fight one-on-one?' and you're right, but that's a lot less fucking stupid-looking when it's juxtaposed and cut-up by editing trickery, which this doesn't have at all due to its nature, obviously.

  quantity over quality

• Review by Badboy ★★

  Crazy Samurai Musashi is incredibly compelling for a film that is essentially one long fight scene with minimal dialogue.

  Not exactly a great all around movie, but the ambition is nuts.
  They do repeat a few sequences a few times, but it's to be expected from a budget and choreography perspective.

• Review by HKFanatic ★★★★★ 2

  I've watched hundreds of action movies in my lifetime—there aren't many of them I'd readily call experimental, avant garde, or alienating. "Crazy Samurai Musashi," which consists largely of a 77-minute single-take battle sequence in which actor/stuntman Tak Sakaguchi faces down some 400 opponents, is less of a narrative and closer to a live-action version of a video game 'no hit' run combined with the secondhand exhaustion of watching a live sporting event (I only noticed one hidden cut and poor Tak looks really, really tired by the end of this thing). Despite the nonstop 'action,' the film unavoidably takes on a sense of repetition and monotony one might more readily associate with Slow Cinema. As such, I can't fault anyone who finds "Mushashi" incredibly boring. For me, its experiential qualities make it the most interesting action movie of our young decade.

• Review by Sam ★

  I was quite excited to watch this based on the premise of a 75ish minute uncut fight scene. In practice however, it turns out that a 75 minute uncut fight scene is actually really tedious to watch.

  This film reminds me of the fencing showdown game on Wii Sports Resort

• Review by Nathan Stuart ★★★ 5

  This is a hard one to rate. It's easy to see the arguments against it as its structured more like a video game (presumably to allow Tak pause to breathe), rather than an actual film and despite being bookended by pieces of narrative, it's completely forgettable stuff with some offensively bad digital after effects.

  But, when you get to the meat of it, it's all about the action here, as Tak Sakaguchi takes on an entire clan (ignore the numbers) all in one single take. The result is an hour-ish long duel in which he fights his way through waves of enemies, pausing only to take water briefly here and there as he cuts his and slashes his way through…

• Review by Jim Film ★½

  So this isn’t very high rated but I came across it on prime and it sounded intriguing.

  It looked very gamey and was a bit dumb like extremely unrealistic only one attacking at a time and it was like a YouTube parody but with heavy suspension of disbelief I was able to just enjoy the combat and watch it mindlessly which is good for when I don’t want to think to much because I have my deep films then I have stuff like this this is the beauty of cinema except for when it’s complete dog shit lol.

  
  It’s kinda along the lines of who saved captain Alex where the budget ain’t there but the actors look like they’re having…

• Review by ratbastard ★★ 1

  Experimental action from Yuji Shimomura, based on the mythical exploits of a historical figure. Set in 1604, Japan. Master swordsman ‘Miyamoto Musashi’ has defeated master ‘Seijūrō’ and his brother ‘Denshichirō’ of the ‘Yoshioka’ family. The Yoshioka family duly dispatch all 100 remaining family members, and 300 of their allies to defeat Musashi. Stylish, ambitious, exhausting. The film opens with a conventional prologue, establishing the situation and introducing Musashi. This leads to a remarkable 70+ minute continuous take action sequence, in which Musashi slaughters waves of Samurai. Tak Sakaguchi delivers an impressive physical performance as Musashi - the lad looks understandably knackered by the end. The action passes through various locations, though the relentless static duels quickly become repetitive and dull…

• Review by Sean Gilman ★★★

  Legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi has defeated the champion of the Yoshioka clan in a duel. In retaliation, the clan gathers 100 samurai and 300 mercenaries to ambush him and exact their revenge. But then things go terribly, terribly wrong as that crazy samurai kills them all, one after another in a 75 minute handheld sequence shot. Crazy Samurai Musashi is an experimental action film more admirable for its tenacity and the stamina of its star, Sakaguchi Tak, than its choreographic pyrotechnics. Tak only has a handful of moves, and he uses them again and again, such that even the coolest (my favorite being a head fake followed by slapping his opponents sword and then a little leap to bonk them on the top of their head) lose their charm after awhile, leaving only the exhausting monotony of senseless violence. Call it “Sword of Bore-doom.”

  The rest at The Chinese Cinema.

• Review by Jack🧠 ★★★ 1

  A fight scene tells a story. The physical dynamics have highs and lows, arcs and momentum. When you start to draw out that fight scene over a long duration of time, you lose some of the thrill, some of the investment. In Crazy Samurai Musashi, the central sequence is a 77-minute long, one-take fight scene. Within these 77 minutes, the titular Musashi Miyamoto slays 588 opponents. There is a sense of improvisation and unpredictability to the action on screen; a feat like this simply could not be meticulously choreographed and rehearsed. It is free, floaty, and sometimes exciting. For the most part, each kill has the same weight and pace. The fights are staggered - through this there is this…