‘Bushido’ is veteran director Kazuya Shiraishi’s first samurai drama, but like his critically acclaimed 2018 police-versus-yakuza action film ‘The Blood of Wolves’, the film is a lovingly conceived and carefully executed throwback to the genre revives.
The earlier film was inspired by Kinji Fukasaku’s gritty 1970s series “Battles Without Honor and Humanity,” which exposed the hollowness of the traditional gang code. ‘Bushido’, based on a celebrity rakugo (comic stories) story, similarly reminiscent of old-school samurai swashbucklers, complete with top heroes bent on justice and revenge. Thematically, then, it is closer to the films of a populist entertainer like Masahiro Makino (the “Jirocho” series) than to a genre deconstructionist like Masaki Kobayashi, whose Ronin protagonist in his 1962 masterpiece “Harakiri” is rather deeply rooted in despair is then conventionally noble. Yet ‘Bushido’ shares some of ‘Harakiri”s scathing criticism of a feudal society full of cruelty and corruption.
