The further adventures of ...

Sanjuro.

The samurai hero of Yojimbo returns here. His name is Sanjuro and so is the title of the movie (think First Blood and then Rambo). This time around Sanjuro is helping 9 young samurai fight against the corruption in their clan.

I don’t know what you readers think is a well written story – Seven, Usual Suspects, maybe Fight Club – these are the movies that sort of come up when one mentions the writing. Well forget all those and say Sanjuro. To me, good writing is when the writer questions what the audience would.

Sanjuro is supposed to be super smart as well as a great fighter (he can rival Lone Wolf with his dispatchment of 20 or more men at once) but his planning is what makes him great.

At one point the 9 samurai want to attack the bad guys who are travelling light. Now the audience watching this film knows this is a trap, and the 9 samurai should too, but they are very naïve and are filled with valor and want to act. Sanjuro acts like the audience and tells them not to go. Then calls them fools for thinking they should! This is just one example out of many in this film. BUT it forces the writer to come up with something else to do.

If the storyline is setting up a trap, most movies would have the 9 samurai fall into the trap and then Sanjuro would have to go save them. But not here, he stops them, so now the writers have to alter the storyline. This happens a few times in this film so that the writers are always on their toes and so are we. You never know what will happen next and even when a plot point is being set up, we aren’t sure if it will follow through.

That is what makes a well written movie to me. Constantly using Sanjuro to tell the 9 that they have to smarten up because the audience who is watching them is smart too!

The other point this film makes is that no one is what they appear to be. Sanjuro appears to be a beggar but is actually an honourable samurai, the guard appears bad, but he is actually a good person, the ugly man – who everyone thinks is a villain is really a good guy, and so on. Sanjuro himself confirms this when he explains to the 9 that they shouldn’t judge by appearances!

The film also has some really great actions scenes and the character of Sanjuro is explored a little bit more here.

In the first film Sanjuro just wants to kill all the bad guys in the movie – since almost every character was evil, we didn’t need to know anything about Sanjuro to realize that he is obviously the good guy.

For the second movie, we know he’s the good guy, but we get a glimpse into his true nature. He insults people when he means to complement them. It’s just his way of talking. He actually cares for these 9 fools and helps them, not for money, like in Yojimbo, but for a sense of good.

He is also compared to a sword that cannot be sheathed. His violent nature is questioned by one of the female characters in film. We never questioned it in Yojimbo, because everyone in that movie was a gangster and deserved to die (well by Sanjuro’s reasoning).

But there are good people in this film and Sanjuro’s violence is questioned and even put to the test. He is about to kill a random guard, but is told not to by the lead female and so he lets him live – and later we find out that the guard was actually a really good man who was just fooled into believing his master was the good guy! When have you EVER IN YOUR LIFE seen that happen in a movie???? If so, tell me, cause I never did! So Sanjuro would have been wrong in killing that man, which begs the question – how many other random guards were really good men? Sanjuro is never cruel though and everyone he killed was a do or die situation, but the guard was different because they had captured him and it would’ve been an execution, not an act of war. But Sanjuro only knows dis-trust and killing, he is sword that never in it’s sheath. And as the lady points out, the best swords stay in their Sheaths.

The best swords are kept in their sheath’s was a statement that lingered with Sanjuro for the rest of the film and he uses the line to teach the samurai a lesson in the end and it’s a great metaphor for this film.

This and Yojimbo are MUST BUYS for everyone who reads this. Both masterpieces.

5/5

J-Man.