(Madman)

Ninja Robin Hood

Goemon Ishikawa is a character from Japanese folklore who steals from the rich and gives to the poor; he is basically the ninja version of Robin Hood. Directed by Kazuaki Kiriya, previously responsible for the Casshern movie, Goemon begins as a light-hearted and gleefully historically inaccurate action/comedy, similar in a lot of ways to Plunkett & Macleane or A Knight’s Tale. Goemon defeats legions of soldiers, leaps across rooftops like a videogame character and spends his downtime watching geisha raves. It’s incredibly silly but joyfully so, with the blatantly computer-generated special effects creating a cartoony feel – almost every outdoor scene looks like it’s happening in a vividly coloured but mostly empty expanse, obviously filmed in front of green screens. Halfway through the story though, Goemon becomes a melodramatic epic full of flashbacks and tragedy that feels like something far too heavy to be grafted onto such a lightweight set-up. The characters are too goofy and one-dimensional to portray the emotional range they suddenly switch to, and it doesn’t know when to end, heaping tragedy on tragedy until you stop caring who dies next. The energetic stunts and lavish pseudo-period costumes are definitely worth seeing, but Goemon feels like two movies jammed together when they would have worked better kept separate.

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JODY MACGREGOR

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