Master martial

The actor, writer, cartoonist, poet, and director Takeshi Kitano is beloved in Japan, where he started as a comedian in the Seventies, emerging frequently since to publish a collection of essays, host a TV special, or make a movie that he might star in, too.

Zatoichi is one such project, with Kitano as a 19th-century itinerant masseur who arrives in a small town that is controlled by a vicious gang. This masseur, although apparently blind, is a master swordsman, and soon brings the gang to its knees.

There is a substantial back story: sick wives, Samurai warriors for hire, geishas, muggers, cross-dressers, and a song-and-dance number featuring the whole cast.

The film is full of tightly choreographed confrontations - people whipping through a storm, whirling with grace, spinning in staccato, slicing the air with shouts. Baddies drop like woodshavings.

But where Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon preened a little too much and was in love with its own elegance, Zatoichi is more of a crazy puppet show.

At its centre is Kitano - his hair bleached a cool blonde, his body compact and disciplined - passing his walking-stick off as a wand, a sword, a baton. It is as though he is conducting the film with it. This man is such a force, a crash of a cymbal made f lesh.

It matters very little that some of the film is rather chaotic and confusing, because by the closing all-cast dance (a kind of West Side Story rumble reimagined by Stomp) you will have been put into a trance, gawking at Kitano's vaudeville guts.

This film is a shebang, a full-scale show, complete with everything you would happily pay to see: costumes, tattoos, scratchy folk music, gambling in saki dens. You will eat it up.

Zatoichi
Cert: 18