Review of Tajomaru: Avenging Blade

A lavish and interesting production. It is clearly made in a new style, telling an old Japanese story. The story is quite good, though the plot has a lot of holes. For example there is a betrayal by the young boy "adopted" by the two brothers, but no explanation of why or how that came to pass. I gave this film a low rating because of the sound track. The background music is not appropriate to the film in any way. It is like some 15 year old kid added his favorite music to a new film. The music, none of which is Japanese, is really bad, inappropriate and at times almost destroys the scenes it is playing "behind". Whoever thought of adding this terrible collection of modern, western music to a Japanese period film is lost and confused. Were it not for this I would have given the interesting story, lavish costuming and acting a higher score.