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When we last saw the intrepid ninja Ishikawa Goemon (Raizo Ichikawa), he was about to be boiled alive. But a good ninja is both hard to find, and even harder to kill. With the help of the enigmatic Hattori Hanzo, Goemon lives to skulk another day, and sets his sights on bringing down the warlord who tried to turn him into soup -- Toyotomi Hideyoshi. And as always, in the background, the suble hand of Tokugawa Ieyasu is pulling strings as he plots to rule all of Japan!

Probably the second best in the series...

Weakest of the original trilogy by a long way

According to history, Goemon Ishikawa was boiled alive after a failed assassination attempt on Toyotomi Hideyoshi (the man who unified Japan in the late 16th century). The problem is that this fact gets in the way of yet another Shinobi movie and at the end of the second film (the one immediately preceding this one) you see Ishikawa about to be tossed into the pot of boiling oil. The film makers get around this by saying that the man who was boiled was NOT Ishikawa but a double who was willing to pretend to be him. While not exactly believable, this worked well enough and the movie seems to be more a &quot;what if&quot; sort of film. Throughout most of the movie, Ishikawa and a new sidekick ninja (sort of like his &quot;Robin&quot;) do a lot of things to annoy and destabilize the government. However, this never was that satisfying for two reasons. First, their most daring work (the abduction or assassination of Hideyoshi&#39;s heir) was a complete failure. Second, when Ishikawa finally succeeds in penetrating Hideyoshi&#39;s castle in the film and is about to murder the man, Ishekawa realizes that the guy is about to die anyways of natural causes and he just leaves--muttering something about &quot;killing him would be too kind&quot;! So, he spent the entire movie trying to kill the man and doesn&#39;t when he finally gets a chance. And so, while the film is enjoyable and well made, there is not sense of satisfaction when all is said and done. It ends with a fizzle. Despite these serious problems with the plot, this is probably the second best of the three films. Not bad at all--just anticlimactic.

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Shinobi No Mono 3: Resurrection

The third film in the Shinobi No Mono series begins with Goemon escaping execution and a double taking his place. Although now officially &quot;dead,&quot; Goemon cannot resist aggravating the local government, even stealing the head of his double, which is on public display as a warning to the people. All of this is enjoyable and probably the best section of the movie. Soon the intrigue gets rolling. Goemon is still swearing vengeance on Hideyoshi, who has united Japan and now has a foolish plan to invade Korea. Meanwhile, an ambitious schemer waits in the background to wrest control away from Hideyoshi. There appear to be only three ninjas left. Goemon wants revenge. Another wants success, and the third wants to follow Goemon. Shinobi No Mono: Resurrection is an okay film, about equal to the first film. Those wanting a lot of swordplay should look elsewhere. Viewers interested in the historical aspects of ninjas and of Japan will probably enjoy the film the most. The film builds to a nice ending which resolves all the plot threads and brings the story arc to a fitting close. The AnimEigo DVD collection has one more film, but I cannot see where the Goemon series is going to go from here.

The first Shinobi No Mono is a wonderfully exciting action/adventure movie, and the second is a decent-enough follow-up with a downer of an ending. But this, the third one, is noticeably weaker, less coherent and engaging. The greatest flaw in it is that the historical Goemon was boiled alive at the end of the last movie, and the real-life personages he is vowing revenge on didn&#39;t die afterwards, so to fit in with the facts of history, he has to spend the film sneaking around climbing things and letting off smoke bombs but not really changing anything, and at the end just lets the bad guy go, since what else could he do? A few occasionally nice fight scenes and ninja tricks aside, the runtime is mostly taken up by far too much court intrigue featuring uninteresting characters we don&#39;t care about. You could probably skip this one and have a better impression of the series as a whole.

User reviews

Shinobi No Mono 3: Resurrection

Probably the second best in the series...

About Equal to the First Film

Weakest of the original trilogy by a long way

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