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Just perfect...

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

First I will say i have no clue if any of this is historical correct. I have watched it as pure fiction. From that point of view I have to say I was well entertained. It seemed like natural lives of ninjas depicted in the movie. So no flying ninjas here or anything really wild :-)Acting was fine but not amazing. I think the action scenes was good and realistic for being a ninja movie. Characters are not very deep but fine to make the movie flow and not seem like cardboard characters.At times I guess the movie slows down without getting boring while following the main characters personal life. So I guess I would recommend it to fans of Japanese cinema that likes samurai/ninja movies and do not require non stop action. I look forward to see the next movie in the series.

There are very, VERY many excellent samurai films. It's a shame then, that there are so few good movies focusing on the ninja. At least as far as what's been released in the U.S. anyway. Still, considering just how highly regarded ninja are in American pop culture, it's a mystery why the Shinobi No Mono series isn't more widely known.The series is based loosely on true events and features far more grounded action than Ninja Gaiden fans might expect. After all, the real life ninja were all about infiltration, espionage, sabotage, assassination, and subterfuge with their enemies not knowing what hit them until far too late. Straight combat was strictly a samurai thing.The first three films are part of a single story arc and takes place during Japan's Sengoku (Warring States) Period which lead to Tokugawa Ieyasu becoming the first supreme Shogun. The fourth movie is a stand alone story taking place a number of years later when Ieyasu was consolidating his power and features a different main character (though played by the same lead actor).All in all, the Shinobi No Mono series is definitely worth a watch for ninja fans. Also, anyone interested in Japanese history, or even anyone with a taste for period political thrillers should check it out. We can only hope that the rest of this series will some day be released here.

Raizô Ichikawa plays Ishikawa Goemon, a legendary bandit hero in this Japanese trilogy set during the reign of Oda Nobunaga--the man who nearly conquered all of Japan during the 16th century (before this, the country was split into many disunited kingdoms). The problem with this is that after I researched about the real life Goemon, I found that very little is known about the man and so over the years Japanese plays and movies have taken great liberties with who the man MIGHT have been. In this movie, Goemon is a ninja--though other sources I read didn't make mention of this nor did I read about him trying to assassinate Nobunaga, but another man (Hideyoshi)--but this isn't even certain.In this film, the ninjas are not just lone agents of death or spies but are an organized group led by an inscrutable man whose real goals and machinations are a bit hard to follow, as he plays so many different angles. The one fairly constant thing about the boss is his desire to see Nobunaga die, as he apparently represents a threat to their way of life. Initially, Goemon is give great responsibility and power within ninjadom (Is that a word? Well, it should be if it isn't.). However, Goemon is too proud and not especially careful (even though his father warned him) and he falls into a trap--a trap that obligates him to personally murder the seemingly indestructible Nobunaga.I'll be honest here--the plot was so convoluted and hard to follow at times that I had to struggle to keep watching. This is NOT the easiest Japanese series for a Westerner to follow--not nearly as easy as Ichikawa's "Sleepy Eyes of Death" series or Kitano's "Zatoichi" series. Now this isn't to say it's bad--just a bit tougher to follow--and I already DID know quite a bit about Nobunaga and his dream of forcibly unifying Japan.Overall, while you'd think this is a big action movie, it isn't. Sure, there's some fighting but the emphasis is much more on the behind the scenes stuff and the conniving--not the battles or even many of the assassination attempts. I liked the movie but was far from in love with it. I will have to see the final two films to see what I think of the overall product, though I do love the idea of a story so big it takes several films to complete (such as the epic "Samurai" series from the 1950s).

If you came of age around the same time I did, you no doubt remember the spate of lousy American-made ninja flicks like ENTER THE NINJA (1981), REVENGE OF THE NINJA (1983), NINJA III: THE DOMINATION (1984), and the nearly indescribably boring and Swedish-made THE NINJA MISSION (1984). I have no idea why the boom happened, but Ninja were every bloody place for about five years, infesting television, comic books, bestselling adventure novels, and other media, (though their absence from pop music is conspicuous, but I guess that area of entertainment was already awful enough during that decade) and their general craptasticness and ubiquity earned them a place in my heart right next to uncontrollable projectile vomiting or being on the receiving end of a perfectly executed kick to the nuts. Even by the admittedly over-the-top standard of skills seen in any garden variety martial arts flick, the cinematic/pop culture exploits of the ninja were exceptionally cartoonish and juvenile, rendering the fabled masters of assassination and espionage into caricature and stripping them of much mystery and respectful fascination. Even the excellent LONE WOLF & CUB movies suffered from such crazy theatrics, but those films got away with it by having the sense to be completely gory and insanely ultra-violent, unlike any of the American entries that starred boring rent-a-ninja Sho Kosugi.With all of that in mind I approached the recent US release of SHINOBI NO MONO with some trepidation, but as it starred one of my favorite chambara actors, Raizo Ichikawa — best known as the red-headed ronin Kyoshiro Nemuri — and was described as being the first film to take the ninja seriously and treat him in a realistic manner, I was willing to give it a chance.The film is the first in a series about real life ninja/thief Goemon Ichikawa, described in some circles as a Japanese analog to Robin Hood, although to the best of my recollection Robin Hood didn't meet his end by being boiled alive in a vat of oil. Anyway, after a somewhat tedious first third of the film in which we must endure far too much exposition regarding the film's various intrigues, we get down to Goemon's adventures as a top notch soldier and ninja who is charged with killing an asshole warlord (Tomisaburo Wakayama, real-life brother to Shintaro Katsu of ZATOICHI fame, and ten years away from screen immortality as LOne Wolf) while having an affair with his commander's sexually-neglected wife. The affair turns out to be more than it seems, as does Goemon's master, and when the doody hits the fan Goemon goes on the lam and hides out in a whorehouse, there finding love with a sweet prostitute. He gives her the money to buy her freedom so they can retreat to a secluded home in the woods and start anew, but Goemon's past catches up with him and he's forced into accepting an assassination mission or else the lives of his loving wife and unborn child will be forfeit.Once you get past the turgid first act, the flick's a lot of fun in an old school way, and the ninja skills/martial arts are surprisingly realistic, featuring none of the superhuman looniness I would have expected. The fights and ninja stuff were choreographed by Masaki Hatsumi, a doctor of natural healing techniques as well as being the 34th Grandmaster of Budo Taijutsu and founder of the Bujinkan Dojo, an all-around thoughtful badass who knows his stuff, so there's an intimate intensity to the combat that allows the viewer to worry about Goemon as a human being whose skin is the only thing separting his guts from the cold and dusty ground.The cinematography is reminiscent of a lower-budgeted and perhaps rushed Kurosawa wannabe, but the film looks great and is definitely a fun way to spend 116 minutes. I enjoyed it enough to want to see the next installment, so TRUST YER GRANDPA and rent it.