The Shogun Assassins (1979) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by Joachim Andersson ★★★

  Massive ninja epic has angry ninja summoning other ninjas to take on the evil shogun, including a young Hiruyoki Sanada. Well made but is one of those very Japanese movies that introduces about a million different characters that you really should know about before even watching it so it took me about an hour before I actually felt that I had a decent understanding of what the hell was going on. And I would have like more blood. But I guess that goes for every movie I watch.

• Review by cayce ★★★

  Whew this is one long movie. It's dope though! Got some good Toei regulars, Hiroki Matsukada is a great lead. There's some really good ninja bullshit, but it is unfortunately pretty spread out; that being said I do really appreciate this will be going like a pretty straightforward historical affair but then a ninja turns into a monkey or uses telepathy or turns into a meteor and flies into space(!). That's good shit. Like every movie that isn't Lone Wolf & Cub this could have really benefitted from some Lone Wolf & Cub levels of blood, but there are a few good moments of violence sprinkled throughout. Overall the plot is not really as hard to follow as other reviews say once you get past the introductions, and it's a good time with some really choice moments even though the pacing can drag a bit at times. Looking forward to checking out some more, shorter, Nakajima flicks.

• Review by Kevin McCormick ★★★

  This weird historical fantasy would be better served if the title and poster art conveyed what this is really about: Ninjas. It's infested with ninjas. Wall to wall ninjas. Ninja spies. Ninja sappers. Ninja engineers building water pumps out of bamboo shoots. Ninja diplomats. A ninja monastery chock full of ninja nuns who moonlight as ninja prostitutes when needed. Ninja monkey sorcerers. Blue ninjas versus red ninjas. Ultra-serious dialogue with lines like "I destroyed God but I still believe in ninja." Alas, the ninja surplus cannot save an overlong and sluggish script.

• Review by Daryl : Part One ★★★

  In the space of three years Hiroyuki Sanada starred in Shogun's Samurai (1978), The Shogun Assassins (1979), and Shogun's Ninja (1980). This is easily the weakest of the three movies and the one that features Sanada the least.

  ... Coincidence?

  TSA is a long-ass chanbara movie that feels like a sluggish history lesson. There are some really good-looking skirmishes but I wasn't enamoured by the overall meat and potatoes visuals of the film. There's an attempt at a more stylistic finale but after nearly two and a half hours it's all too little too late.

• Review by HokiFish ★★★½

  Some good ninja and samurai business…

  🥷🥷🥷

• Review by phrosen ★★

  A shambling behemoth of a film. A solid two and a half hours gives you a lot of time to tonally be all over the place. Bookended by psychedelic effects of 70s science fiction, The Shogun Assassins touches on everything else inbetween. It's campy at times, in line with Shaw Brothers comedies of the era. Occasionally it veers into the supernatural but more often than not, the film forgets it's campy at all. It does the Fukasaku thing of introducing characters with title cards, of taking a step back from the events on screen, framing them in a somewhat historical context. It goes so far, that at times you're just looking at a map with Osaka Castle's various moats on it. Realistic battles deeply interwoven with superhuman feats. A stiff historical drama one moment, a wild ninja spectacle the next. I'd probably liked either one of those takes more than this amalgamation of the two.