Overly Violent, Overly Simplified Martial Arts Takeoff

Rating: 8/10 (25 January 2019)

12 October 2003 (revised January 25, 2019). This sometimes innovative, sometimes, daring, sometimes amazing martial arts-revenge thriller comes off as a stylistic choreography of fighting complexity. Uma Thurman, though, seems to escape death more by accident than by skill or talent. The retro-violence is so much over the top that it becomes a reflection of the comic-book and graphic novel version Japanese samurai movies. The flashbacks and animations, the emotional and cute comedic scenes are great. How does Uma Thurman survive her first encounter and how does she accidentally find a weapon in the second encounter and then how does she really fend for herself in a somewhat less than brilliant sword fight in the third. Overall, this was an amazing movie with great blending of some excellent flourishes for old movies with a consistently prominent soundtrack to heighten the whole independent cult film feel, but it misses the perfection mark by a few notches. Eight out of Ten Stars.