As a big fan of the golden age of chanbara I've been enjoying the recent revival of Samurai movies that possibly started as far back as Samurai Fiction and the Castle of Owls remake and then got its big push with Kitano's Zatoichi adaptation. However despite their creative new take on the genre even the best recent chanbara like shinobi no kuni, sanada ten braves, sekigahara or Tsukamoto's Killing usually suffer from many internal inconsistencies in tone and quality which prevents them from truly ushering in an era of new classics if you will.
Samurai Marathon is among the first to feel like a complete movie. Great acting and production value, lots of drama, sprinkles of humour and warmth, meaningful action scenes and a memorable score by freaking Philip Glass(!?!). I didn't expect much but I was pleasantly surprised.
The movie starts off deliberately slow, introducing all the characters and their little rural castle town one by one, you'd think this will just be a fairly light-hearted feel-good movie set to the backdrop of the waning years of the Samurai rule in feudal Japan. Each character has their own motivations why they would want to win the marathon. The price: they can ask whatever they wish from their lord. Some are in it for selfish reasons, others just want a better life for their families. The stakes are already high enough here when the movie starts to shift gears dramatically once the marathon starts, introducing a deadly threat to the entire town that is bigger than each characters' troubles combined. I'm not going to give the plot away but the last third is legitimately tense without ever feeling forced.
Part of what brings all the elements together so well is veteran Bernard Rose's expert direction. He has a real sensibility for the genre and for japanese culture. It never feels like you're watching a movie by a foreign director. The pacing comes off like a throwback to older chanbara movies leaving lots of space inbetween action scenes, where you can just soak in the atmosphere and the beauty of the landscapes. The DP here was Takuro Ishizaka who also lent his hand to the underrated Sakuran and the live action Rurouni Kenshin films. There is other miscellaneous personnel overlap most notably in main actor Takeru Sato, but the whole cast is on point, the biggest standout for me being relative newcomer Nana Komatsu.
This is one movie to check out. Enjoyable from beginning to end, sometimes funny, sometimes violent, sometimes dramatic. A full package.