Not good

Rating: 2/10 (23 July 2002)

Having recently seen Seven Samurai and enjoying it very much, I thought I'd give "Ran" a chance. After all, it was 70th on the All-Time IMDb list and most of the times, I have not been disappointed by films with high ratings on IMDb. This is one of the exceptions...what a stinker of a movie. The DVD quality was horrible, so that might have contributed to my dislike, but I really didn't like this film at all. It was very touhg to get through...I had to watch it in pieces, because I could not take it in doses longer than 30 minute stretches. The acting is horrible throughout, the plot is like a bad soap opera set in Samurai-land, and the visuals, while artistic and nice to look at, are heavy-handed, distracting, and slow down this already tedious film. Had this been an American production, people would bash it beyond all repair...compare it to other 1985 films for example "Back to the Future", and it pales miserably. The dialogue, the comedy, the action...all amateurish. I know it's Kurosawa and he can do great things, but this one was no good and seems like an aging director trying to do something grand and wonderful, and like Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather III", this one fails and is not even worthy of being compared to something like "Seven Samurai." How is this then in the IMDb Top 250 list? Well, it's Kurosawa, and it's different and it's "artsy." But is it good? Nope.