Tajomaru - Avenging Blade Review

Tajomaru follows the exploits of a pair of brothers, Naomitsu and Nobutsuna (Oguri and Ikeuchi) their female childhood friend Ako (Shibamoto) and the street urchin they welcome into their family, Sakuramaru (Tanaka). When the quartet grow up, Ako’s powerful father dies. Although Naomitsu loves Ako, as the elder brother, Nobutsuna decides to take Ako as his own by force for political and monetary benefit. Naomitsu flees with Ako into the forests but are apprehended first by a shock betrayal and secondly by a bandit named Tajomaru. Although Naomitsu eventually defeats him in battle, Ako deserts him. Having bested the bandit, Naomitsu earns the man’s name and his legendary blade and finds himself in charge of a band of outlaws. Later, events conspire to compel Naomitsu to reclaim what he has lost.

Clearly, from the synopsis above, there’s an awful lot going on in Tajomaru. It is unfortunate then, that the film is more than a little dull. Visually, it is stylish and pleasing to the eye, although not in the interior scenes, which look more than a little bit like cheap television studio sets. Outside, however, director Hiroyuki Nakano captures the Japanese countryside in a sumptuous manner. Photography aside, however, the film’s problems are multitudinous.

The characters are dull and uninteresting, the film is deeply conservative in its values and the tone shifts wildly from reserved period drama, to knockabout comedy soundtracked by emo rock, to off-putting melodrama. Lady Ako is criminally underserved by a stupefying, Neanderthal script and even basic things such as continuity are poorly done. Finally, for a film that promises an avenging blade in its very title, the fight sequences are not only infrequent but also smack somewhat of school yard level choreography.

Needless to say, I can’t find a whole lot to recommend Tajomaru: Avenging Blade. The film is perhaps best summed up in a character’s dying words, that are entirely without irony, ‘The potato was delicious’.