The Japanese swordplay flick "The Princess Blade" raises a couple of crucial concerns. Is that "the" really necessary? When did samurais start leaping and flying and dodging bullets like Hong Kong action stars? And do you really need 10 killers to take out one chick and her guru?
No, dunno, and no. But this is a movie about excess. It's excessively long (at least it feels that way), the slo-mo is used in excess (so are the swords), and our heroine, Yuki (Yumiko Shaku), when she does emote, is excessively weepy for a cold-blooded assassin.
To be fair, Yuki has just learned that her father figure, the heartless Byakurai (Kyusaku Shimada), may have killed her mother on the cusp of Yuki's 20th birthday. Based on the Japanese comic book, "The Princess Blade" is aiming for a side order of "Hamlet"-style heartbreak, which it finds for Yuki. The movie centers on a clique of emotionally inaccessible assassins-for-hire whom the government uses to "suppress" rebels.
Before her demise, Yuki's mother ran the house with an iron fist and a stainless-steel sword. Now her taciturn daughter, who by right stands to inherit Byakurai's job, has turned against her co-workers and wants revenge.
Through a series of coincidences, Yuki is partnered with Takashi (Hideaki Ito), a young antigovernment rebel. Because this adaptation, directed by Shinsuke Sato, follows only a comic book's visual logic and shrugs off its narrative duties, Yuki doesn't have to look for revenge. It shows up wherever she happens to be lost in thought.
How she, a trained killer, never hears 10 armed people sneaking up on her is comically baffling. So is the rest of "The Princess Blade," a movie whose violent exterior masks its soapy impulses.
Its corny streak brings the movie too close to cut-rate Chinese Opera epics than should be allowed. Hong Kong vet Donnie Yu did the choreography, which is often breathtakingly lethal, but still. We're one blood-curdling shriek away from any scene in "Farewell My Concubine." Not for nothing, the soundtrack has spineless keyboard twiddles and synthesized strings that strongly suggest Michael Bolton might be on his way to sing the movie's love theme.
"Princess Blade" is rated R for wall-to-wall action violence (swordplay, gunplay and martial-arts combat). Running time: 92 minutes.