Good movie but grossly overrated

From my favorite movies..

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Samurai films like these were actually a big influence on George Lucas. I have to admit that samurai movies were never my thing. They were also a big inspiration on Westerns, which I also wasn't a big fan of. It can be hard to follow a movie with just subtitles, especially one whose plot I don't know getting into. I'd probably still say "Rashomon" is my favorite Akira Kurosawa movie. This is still a great movie in itself.Actually, I think I was actually introduced to the plot of this movie by an episode of "Pokémon"! It was "Showdown At Dark City" which featured these two gangs in a city trying to get help from Ash. You have to give the anime credit for referencing something so highbrow. Anyway, the basic plot is that this guy named Sanjuro (not Yojimbo) goes to this corrupt village where two rival gangs both want him to work for him. As you might have guessed, he ends up playing both of them. There are few sympathetic characters at first.We do see some nice villagers who just want everybody to stop fighting. Sanjuro is shown to have no allies in this film prior to the story. It's a great way of seeing how a single character can play off of everyone else. There's even some really nice social and technological commentary. One guy has a gun which is an odd place for a samurai film. I also felt that the length of this film was just perfect. ****

Considering Kurosawa's incredible filmography, the fact that Yojimbo is generally considered as one of his best is an incredible compliment, and that opinion is very well justified. It is both an extremely entertaining battle of wits with great swordsplay sequences and fantastic dialogue and it also has some moral ambiguity.Ofcourse Toshiro Mifune steals the show once again in a Kurosawa film with his 'cool' charismatic attitude and his indifference to violence, yet also being an individual of some morals even though he seems to only care about gold at the start of the film. However, due to a certain selfless act in the later part of the movie where he saves a certain person it proves he is indeed an individual of some moral value. He is Sanjuro, which is an alias he gives, but nevertheless he is a ronin ( masterless samurai ) who wanders into a town divided by two rival gangs, so he decides to play them against eachother in order to make some gold in the progress since he seems to be penniless when he can't pay for his food at the restaurant. The movie combines Japan's three greatest actors together in one film with Toshiro, Tatsuya Nakadai & Takashi Shimura. After Nakadai's breakthrough in the first two parts of the incredible 'The Human Condition' trilogy in which he plays an idealistic good guy, he decided to play the villain in Yojimbo and in this shows his incredible range as an actor. Always keeping the evil fiendish smile on his face, his screen presence after Mifune has to be one of the strongest in cinematic history. Unfortunately Shimura ( Who had his greatest role in Ikiru (1952) ) has a relatively smart role, but still a crucial one to the plot.As usual Kurosawa uses his trademark tools movement and weather extremely well this film. It uses a lot of widescreen shots and excellent camera angles in which you never seem to miss a thing, they are always set up just right. Combined with the beautiful black and white cinematography there are some of cinema's greatest and most beautiful shots in this movie, especially during the epic final standoff which is one of the greatest scene's ever made. As stated before, Kurosawa also made use of weather once again to create the film's mood. It starts off bright and sunny, and as the violence escalates it starts raining, when finally in the climax there is a very hard wind blowing loads of epic looking dust on the screen. Kurosawa was a master of making loads of things happen in one single shot, and it is also the case here. A lot of shots have interesting things happen in the background, foreground and anywhere else in between. This movie created a couple of remakes such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) by Sergio Leone which, while being a great film, still does not quite live up to the quality of Yojimbo and Last Man Standing (1996) by Walter Hill, which is a very poor film. It goes to show how influential this movie also is to western directors since Kurosawa is also known for combining Japanese and western elements into his films, and you can see a bit of John Ford-like camera work in Yojimbo.Everything summed up this means Yojimbo is an incredibly vibrant, clever, in many cases beautiful motion picture created by the master Kurosawa himself.

Yojimbo is another Akira Kurosawa movie that inspired many westerners, including Sergio Leone, the plot is good, even more at the time it was released, Akira's direction is great, he cuts right in, and great plans, But I admit that I found this movie a tedious one, maybe it is the expectation, I expected a movie well Ran level, but it is not, there are few action scenes, and there are several moments that seem to have a scene of action, and in the End is nothing, the soundtrack is very good, the photograph is also very good, even the film being black and white, impeccable costumes, and good performances, especially the protagonist, who is a great character, one of Akira's best Kurosawa, it's a short movie compared to Ran and The Seven Samurais, but anyway I found the rhythm slow, I was more excited watching Ran. Note 7.4

"This town is full of men who are better off dead," muses ronin Mifune when he saunters into town: "This place would be better off without them." (A clear indication that something's not quite right comes when he sees a dog trot past with a human hand clamped in its jaws...) He approaches one of the two factions vying for control of the town and, when they brag about how dangerous they are, he asks, "So you won't mind if I kill all of you?" "WHAT?" one of the startled bandits cries: "Kill me if you can!" "It'll hurt," Mifune advises him. He cuts down two men and literally disarms a third before walking away. Seeing a coffin maker, he says, "Two coffins." He then pauses, glances back at the mortally wounded third man (who's on his knees, screaming in agony), and offers: "Maybe THREE..." Needless to say, both sides begin bargaining for his services. It's been said that "the Italians are known for their pizza (or is it spaghetti?), which they got from the Chinese." It doesn't take a genius to figure out where Leone got the idea(s) for the FISTFUL OF DOLLARS trilogy.