Violence and swordplay in wild, wild Edo

Izo

Rating: * * * (out of 5)
Director: Takashi Miike
Running time: 128 minutes
Language: Japanese
Opens on Aug. 21

Swords are coming out all over. That's the impression I get watching recent swashbucklers from not only genre veterans like Kihachi Okamoto, who staged a comeback with the samurai comedy "Sukedachiya Sukeroku" in 2001, but also auteurs like Takeshi Kitano, who had never touched a sword in his directing career before remaking the Kenji Misumi classic "Zatoichi" -- and raking in 2.85 billion yen last year.

But Takashi Miike? He likes violence well enough, as shown by the creative ways he has injected everything from slow torture to mass slaughter into his more than 50 films, but somehow I never saw him doing the samurai thing. It would be like Quentin Tarantino making a cowboy movie.

Miike, however, likes trashing critical preconceptions about as much as he enjoys messing with prop blood -- thus his interest in "Izo," a genre-bending film whose sword-for-hire hero ends up battling not only his own demons, but the forces that rule the universe as well.