Versus

 Versus was pretty well received back when it came out - I remember a lot of acquaintances talking about it, and people kept recommending it to me because I liked 'that Japanese stuff'.

 Unfortunately, Anime doesn't tend to be among the Japanese stuff I like. And man, is this movie ever anime-damaged. A disappointment twenty-odd years in the making.

 You can tell exactly what director Ryûhei Kitamura was into back then by watching this: A lot of Matrix, a lot of Tarantino, a lot of Evil Dead, a little of chanbara (samurai) films. Which, fair enough, that's pretty much what all of us nerds- pardon me, geeks, were into. But Kitamura only lifts the shallowest, most juvenile elements for his pastiche, and besides some fun energy and gore, he doesn't really bring much else.
 How shallow of a pastiche is it? When our hero has to find some clothes, the first thing he comes across is a leather trenchcoat.

There be wankers in them woods.

  There's an opening crawl that's so elaborate and pointless it plays as parody; The plot is some nonsense about an ancient confrontation between an evil Shinto priest (Hideo Sakaki) and a pure hearted samurai (Tak Sakaguchi) - the priest wants to control a portal between life and death, the Samurai wants to protect his lady (Chieko Misaka), whose blood is needed for the priest's evil ritual. Oh, and there's zombies because the portal doesn't let anyone in these woods die properly.

 That's just the prologue. These people, and some other mooks, all reincarnate many centuries later - The Samurai as an escaped convict, almost everyone else as Yakuza, and the girl as... a girl they've kidnapped.

 None of them are aware of what's happening, except the priest, who is a yakuza boss this time around, and is pulling the strings to finally do whatever it is he wants to do.

 But it takes a while for the movie to get to that. First we must endure a long stretch where they posture for ages without doing anything, trying to bring some Tarantino cool to the movie by way of tired old anime tropes. Holy shit is it painful to watch.
 I hate the main character with a passion - he's one of those manga antiheroes that's so cool, so above it all they come across as almost narcoleptic, constantly whining about having to do stuff... an absolute piece of shit character. The girl is a blank, constantly waiting for this shitstain to validate her, and the mooks are a one-dimensional collection of anime stock characters without a single shred of charisma between them. You've got the serious, honorable one, the serious one with glasses and long hair, the psychotic clown who looks like he might pull a face muscle from all his mugging, the incompetent one that's so caught up in his panic attack that he looks almost feral... OK, that last one at least was entertaining to watch. Probably not in the way intended, but as trainwrecks go it's a fun one.

 Then there's another bunch of characters that appear out of the blue. Literally, I have no idea what they're doing in this movie, and they barely interact with the... let's call it story. I'd complain, but they're way more fun and interesting than any of the main characters, with the highlight being a psycho pixie (Hoshimi Asai) who turns up and starts punching people. No posturing, no bullshit, only punching. She gets a really funny death, too.

 It's pretty clear the plot in this doesn't matter in the least - it's just an excuse to string together the scenes Kitamura wanted to do; lots of fights and shootouts, all reasonably fun but without any real choreography. It's all about looking cool, not doing cool stuff, which is a shame because they do put in some effort - there's even some wirework involved.

 For your money you also get Zombie killing, some silly jokes (some of them even work!) and lots of very over-the-top gore. Chintzy, very Matrix-inspired techno music, camera work that's all over the place (including a pretty well done Michael Bay homage, of all things) and all the forest scenery you could possibly want.

 I like the movie's energy, at least when it gets going, and I like some of its goofy humour. I wanted to like its "let's go to the woods and film some cool shit" ethos. Hell, I'd even agree that some of it does manage to be cool, when it's not trying too hard. Shave off an hour, preferably all the early scenes with the Yakuza, and it'd be watchable.