I loved the first "Azumi" movie. I've seen Ms. Ueto in a variety of her TV appearances and I've seen my fair share of samurai and ninja flicks. I have to say that this movie was much weaker than I'd expected.
Given the movie's cast and set up in "Azumi", they should have been able to do a much better job with this movie, but instead it was slow, plodding in parts, and sprinkled with very poor, unconvincing, and wooden acting.
When they bothered to reference the first movie, they did so in a manner that was pretty loose and weak. In "Azumi", the title character is the best of a group of superior killers. In "Azumi 2" she seems somehow diminished and less-impressive.
That's not to say it was a total loss. There were a few decent fight scenes and some over-the-top characters. Unfortunately, the movie suffers overall from the simple fact that Shusuke Kaneko and Yoshiaki Kawajiri are not Ryuhei Kitamura and Isao Kiriyama. The latter two truly captured the "manga" feel in their screenplay whereas the former never quite "got it."
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