Zatoichi and the Fugitives (1968)

Not rated, but we're back to the more PG-13 content.  It's not as gory or as sexual as Zatoichi the Outlaw, but it is more than Zatoichi Challenged.  It's got that very special paint red blood.  People are being dismembered.  There's also attempted rape and some mild sexuality.  Still, it isn't exactly an over-the-top R-rated gore fest.  It's just...more than usual.

DIRECTOR:  Kimiyoshi Yasuda

I mean, it's no Zatoichi Challenged, but few things are.  Maybe it's because I've lowered my standards.  Maybe it's because it's the final movie in a self-appointed trilogy of Zatoichi movies that all on the same discs. Maybe...just maybe, the folks behind the Zatoichi franchise are finally figuring out that there need to be some stories --however basic --between each entry in the franchise.  But Zatoichi and the Fugitives was actually pretty darned good.  Well, most of the movie is kind of mid and then the last twenty minutes get really good. But I'll tell you, this isn't the first movie that has been salvaged by a solid conclusion.

Again, my main beef with this series is how repetitive it gets.  The fine folks at Letterboxd redefined it as "episodic", but I have issues with minimalizing it like that.  While Zatoichi films are episodic, in the sense that they have a formula and are ultimately about a blind yakuza (something I just discovered in this movie is that Zatoichi is yakuza...which doesn't really happen on camera?) helping the helpless in his own superpowered way, "episodic" shouldn't necessarily mean "the same."  I watch episodic television from today.  But even more to the point, I watch / have watched a lot of episodic television from yesteryear.  Right now, while watching dishes, I am doing a rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Star Trek, as a franchise, wouldn't go into mythology episode storytelling until later on Deep Space Nine, so I can say that TNG is full-on episodic.  But I can seriously point to the plots of individual episodes and talk about the uniqueness of that story.  It is episodic, yet unique.  Zatoichi often didn't have any sense of uniqueness between individual films until these later movies.  

Ultimately, the formula of these movies isn't bad.  It's just seductive for writers.  But it doesn't really take a lot of effort to tweak the Zatoichi formula to make a more interesting movie.  With the case of Fugitives, it really isn't a massive change to make a story more interesting. It still has the corrupt village boss making a town miserable, but adding the four fugitives who act outside the bounds of a traditional gang attitude makes it so much more interesting.  While this may be an unintentional consequence, these characters become agents of chaos for Zatoichi.  The funny thing is, these criminals are way more intense for Zatoichi specifically than a traditional bad guy.  There was a Superman Returns game after the movie came out.  I had it for XBox 360.  These details don't matter.  The point of this reference is that Superman himself never had a health bar; Metropolis did.  If Metropolis got destroyed, you lose.  We get that Zatoichi is really good at massacring tons and tons of bad guys.  But those guys follow rules.   Yeah, the criminals have more skills than your rando yakuza. But we also know that Zatoichi would kill them in a hot second given free reign.

But my frustration comes from the fact that I mentally have a better story than what is presented here.  It's just as simple.  If anything, it's more simple because it would remove that yakuza staple that we keep getting over and over again.  How much more interesting would it be if the fugitives were all equally skilled to Zatoichi?  That's a story.  Zatoichi kills one of the lower level guys in the gang, just in the same way that he does in the beginning, and the four guys --who all have their own special murder skill set --come after him one-by-one.  They all put him through trials, Man with the Golden Gun style and Zatoichi dispatches them until he realizes that his buddy, the doctor's kid, is the head of the group who is messing with him and observing his skills.  We get that end fight sequence like we did in this movie and that's something to watch. That there is a movie that I would pass around.

I can't complain though.  I do love the end of this movie.  There's been this push that shows that Zatoichi is willing to die for any cause that he adopts lately.  In Zatoichi Challenged, he throws his sword at a stray bad guy, leaving him defenseless against the big bad. In this case, he takes a bullet early in a fight.  He's borderline dying for the entire last act of the movie.  He also escapes, because he's Zatoichi.  But in his weakened state, he takes out all of these dudes, including the doctor's kid.  That's some good action.  Yeah, I knew that Zatoichi was going to survive.  We all knew Zatoichi was going to survive.  I have a few more discs to go in the series.  Also, it would be weird if these were the dudes who won.  But I loved that it was actually difficult for this guy. One of the problems of having a Mary Sue character like Zatoichi is that everyone is worse at fighting than he is.  But with this, there was a real threat to survival.  It's kind of what was introduced in another entry with the loud noises, but actually effective.  (Who knew? His weakness was bullets!) 

I was shocked to see Takashi Shimura in this movie. I don't have the cultural context for how influential the Zatoichi movies are, but this is the first time I recognized a celebrity in one of these movies.  I loved his performance, but he's also part of the more inconsequential parts of the film.  Like most Zatoichi movies, there are parts that I do not care about.  I want to care about them.  I'm not saying that these parts aren't necessary to make a movie.  It's just that I wish that these scenes were somehow quintessential.  Instead, we have these moments that will never come into play with the protagonist.  Zatoichi has all of these moments where he says that he's never met anyone like [insert name here] before.  But these characters never carry on to other movies.  With the case of the doctor, he is this man who gives away medication and Zatoichi is moved.  I guarantee that we'll never hear about this dude again.  (Watch, Zatoichi 19 is his team up with this man just to make me look like a jerk.)

The good news is that I'm having a better time with these movies that I was in the past.  It's actually kind of surprising that it happened when I watched three of these movies in a row. It isn't perfect, but it is definitely watchable.