If Blind Fury shows anything, it's how good ShintarÅ Katsu was in the role of Zatoichi. Rutger Hauer is good in the American adaptation, but he's not as convincing in those "bumbling" moments where he lets someone believe his blindness is a real impairment. Katsu was able to somehow make you believe in both the character's clownish innocence and his sly cleverness. There's too much talking and explaining in the American version, possibly. What rankles most for me isn't the attempt at doing a modern-day adaptation, because you do get some amusing set pieces like Zatoichi (not his name) driving a car or chopping up a crooked roulette wheel, but rather that they turned it into a cheesy 80s action movie. The movie tries to ape a lot of tropes from across all the Zatoichi movies (though the plot is mostly that of Zatoichi Challenged), but rarely does it achieve the same visual flair or poetry. The villains are uniformly terrible send-ups of typical henchmen, stuntmen who have never taken an acting course in their lives, and the finale where Hauer must fight another swordsman feels forced. Blind Fury isn't without its pleasures - mostly that it's bonkers, unless you believe a blinded soldier would walk out of a Vietnamese jungle with a samurai sword and Daredevil's powers - but it falls quite short of the original source.
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Shedfire
@generalche: Probably not, which is why I stopped watching movies all together after this one.
generalche
Rutger Hauer as a blind guy who carries a katana in his walking stick. Can it get any more bad-ass?Siskoid
If Blind Fury shows anything, it's how good ShintarÅ Katsu was in the role of Zatoichi. Rutger Hauer is good in the American adaptation, but he's not as convincing in those "bumbling" moments where he lets someone believe his blindness is a real impairment. Katsu was able to somehow make you believe in both the character's clownish innocence and his sly cleverness. There's too much talking and explaining in the American version, possibly. What rankles most for me isn't the attempt at doing a modern-day adaptation, because you do get some amusing set pieces like Zatoichi (not his name) driving a car or chopping up a crooked roulette wheel, but rather that they turned it into a cheesy 80s action movie. The movie tries to ape a lot of tropes from across all the Zatoichi movies (though the plot is mostly that of Zatoichi Challenged), but rarely does it achieve the same visual flair or poetry. The villains are uniformly terrible send-ups of typical henchmen, stuntmen who have never taken an acting course in their lives, and the finale where Hauer must fight another swordsman feels forced. Blind Fury isn't without its pleasures - mostly that it's bonkers, unless you believe a blinded soldier would walk out of a Vietnamese jungle with a samurai sword and Daredevil's powers - but it falls quite short of the original source.badblokebob
It's not equal to the Zatoichi movies it's based on, but it was still way more fun than I was expecting.crawatt
i understand that Blind Fury isn't exactly a masterpiece, but come on, just 396 checks? WTF?JimEastwood71
In a way this is a lot like the films in the Zatoichi series.