In the small rural village of Kinugasa, three teenage farmhands seek to break the monotony of their agricultural chores by training themselves in the art of swordsmanship. To help develop their skills, they participate in mock raids on the local villages to prove which of them is the strongest. However, their superiority in the relatively harmless arena of adolescent warfare becomes threatened and things turn deadly when a young warrior returns from the real battlefield and attempts to exert his dominance.

This low-budget, period-set martial arts actioner may be helmed by the former assistant director to Takashi Miike, but it shows no signs of any Miike-style magic. Billed as a samurai saga, the film is far from being a historical epic and instead revolves mainly around a bunch of brawling teenagers. While this approach could have potentially provided a change from the norm, the film barely explores the idea and instead just dishes up some weak soap-opera style characters who want to be the toughest kids around. To make matters worse, there is also a tendency to fill in the gaps with childish humour, completely removing the illusion of the era and making the end product feel more like a bad teen comedy.

If you're hoping that the action will redeem 'Samurai Warrior' then you're also in for a disappointment. Most of the fights are just meant to be kids scuffling, so they use wooden swords and normally end in some kind of comical victory. The only real fight comes during the finale, but as you would expect it is cheaply constructed and contains a number of quick cuts to try and disguise the fact. In fairness to the cast, some of them do seem to possess some genuine skill with the sword but I really wouldn't really want to judge them on the basis of this outing alone.

No matter how you look at it, 'Samurai Warrior' is a weak effort. Sure, you could blame the budget or time constraints, but then you could argue that other directors have done more with less. At the end of the day, there just isn’t much of a tale to tell here and the overall approach is definitely a bad one.