Enjoyable enough, I suppose, but the whole thing is plagued by Kitano dumbing down of his style in order to appease and appeal to mainstream crowds. I'm not the biggest fan of his work, but at least there was a sense of tonal consistency in his oeuvre up until this point. This film - hampered by the traditional folk story as well as past incarnations of the role - seems to hover halfway in between a total Kitano work and a bland, mainstream samurai tale. As a result, it's never that interesting or exciting, despite its pure entertainment factor.

It's also got some of the worst CGI I've ever seen, making me wonder why Kitano chose to go that route, given his infamous dislike of the format. It's claimed he did it because he wanted to make the blood and gore appear beautiful, but any number of horror films have done this without using computers, and they all look great. So I don't get it.

But yeah, rather blah film.