Azumi 2: Death or Love

(2005, Shusuke Kaneko)

The original Azumi was based on a popular Manga series set shortly after the rise to power in the early 17th century of the Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu. The story follows Azumi (played by actress and J-Pop star Aya Ueto), a female assassin whose mission is to cement the peace established by Tokugawa, and prevent Japan from lapsing back into its previous state of civil war, by disposing of the last few remaining warlords hostile to Tokugawa’s rule.
In Azumi 2, the story continues in essentially the same vein, with Azumi pursuing one final assassination target – only this time she is aided by a band of Robin Hood-style bandits, hunted by a team of super-powered enemy ninjas, and stalked by a treacherous infiltrator (played by Chiaki Kuriyama, who Western viewers will most likely recognise as Gogo, the sadistic schoolgirl assassin from Kill Bill, Volume 1).
Azumi 2, like its predecessor Azumi, somehow manages to have a script and plot that are overly simplistic and needlessly convoluted at the very same time. However, whereas director Ryuhei Kitamura (notable for his entertaining yakuza-meet-zombies romp, Versus) brought a distinctive and inventive visual flair to the fight scenes and overall comic-book feel of Azumi, Kaneko’s Azumi 2 is a limp, wooden, lacklustre, uninspired, and meandering affair. Kaneko clearly attempts to emulate Kitamura’s style by using different cinematic techniques in every fight scene, but the creativity and effectiveness of Kitamura’s deployment of multiple techniques is simply absent. (Strangely, the same can be said for Kitamura’s own Sky High.) Even the snappy, colourful comic-book feel of Azumi is lost in Azumi 2. The whole thing looks like footage of a bunch of people who got lost in a forest on the way to a cosplay convention.

Azumi 2: Death or Love @ IMDb(UK)