Bunraku

Two mysterious strangers arrive in a town controlled by a ruthless gang boss and team up to take him down. It's a ridiculous, hyperactive example of style over substance...a slick and flashy conglomeration of anime, film noir, spaghetti western and samurai action. It's got a solid cast performing some highly competent fight scenes, and is packed with exciting imagery and visual nods to several other movies. Kinda silly but ultimately worth your time.

Moshe doesn't seem confident in any one of his stylistic choices and decides to insure against total failure by throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the screen and hoping something sticks. And a couple of elements really do. The prison break fight, the animated sequences and some of the overtly corny dialogue work. But the whole is less than the sum of its parts with pointless subplots and an overall lack of focus. Could have been really fun with a steadier hand at the helm.

Very experimental, and can be a bit confusing. However, I loved the style and aesthetic, and the comedy worked for me. Good performances and an interesting pop-up book approach make for a fun action flick.

Mish-mash of wildly diverse styles of design, content and performance, is admittedly fun for a while, as you wait for Moshe's all-or-nothing approach to catch fire. That it doesn't is largely due to a lack of cohesion and focus; a lot of interesting ideas, but nothing hangs together. Still it jump starts often enough to be enjoyable, especially the video-game styled prison escape; performers seem mostly bewildered, except for Harrelson who looks confident and at home anywhere at this point!

Silly hot mess. The only saving grace is some interesting visuals and fight scenes.

One of the finest intro for long time! Incredible funny, stylish and beautiful animation indeed. Unfortunately the rest of the movie did not follow that pattern. There was a lot of fine details during the way, but the story, nor the action, did not give anything you haven't seen before. The style was different, I liked it, but still the director did not get the best out of it. Not even close. And the plot was too complicated.

This is style over substance. It's very stylish, using origami, great colours and everything. The action is stylish. It puts together a few different genres in an extremely fun way. There are so many awesome scenes but this really is about the style and visuals. The plot is interesting and dystopian, the fights are cool, the characters are interesting (and good homages to the genres included in here) and the music is sweet. Even the end credits are cool because of the Patton song.

I thought it might do something interesting in the poker scene, but doesn't. Something about the colors and editing and lack of anything of substance to grasp onto made me feel ill to watch it.

For the first half, 'Bunraku' is visually interesting with some lovely sets, has some decent well directed action scenes and a very nice cast (although none of them do a particularly good job, especially Harrelson who spends his screen time pulling faces and shrugging his shoulders). Then I started noticing the incoherent mess of a story, the nigh on unbearable sound effects, the CGI. Then my brain started melting so I played Jetpack Joyride. WH looks like Jason Statham's dad.

over the top, non stop action, exciting and entertaining. very cool set design and way of telling the story. the mixture of western and samurai was new and exciting as well. very underrated film.

"Paper funny" with good punch lines, punches of all kinds and sword fights. Mix of cowboys, samurai and origami. But there is few serious problems like half of killers we see, is there for only one fight. Some major roles are quite pushed aside due to (too) many fights.

Well that was pretty stupid. Slightly entertaining though.

Blending of a ton of different styles of genres creates one weird, trippy, sloppy mess.

Wow... that sucked

Look, I'm not going to tell you this is a good movie by any stretch. But it's a hell of a lot of fun, and has probably the weirdest cast lineup of any movie I've ever seen.

I want to love this movie. But it really is just a giant mess. It's charming in that sense at least?

Kill Bill for dummies. Ok visuals, bad screenplay, awesome cowboy.

I don't know how I missed this one. It is an over-stylized tale of post-apocalyptic revenge with Ron Perlman and Woody Harrelson! Even Hartnett was good as the mysterious cowboy.

Pretty cool movie reminded me little bit of sin city.

"A mega mash-up in the vein of Sucker Punch, Bunraku jumbles together elements with a self-consciousness that's as turgid as its story proper." - Nick Schager

A story that has been told many times...but in a way that is unfamiliar. The sets and cinematography are different and cool.

The dictionary definition of style over substance

Although I really never figured out what Perlman, Harrelson and Moore were doing in this movie, I still had a lot of fun watching the fight scenes and enjoyed the inventive, playful and highly theatrical sets. lighting and animation. Both Harnett and Gackt are well-cast and it was a hoot watching Hartnett do some of his own stunts, particularly during a set piece, with a nod to Wes Anderson, in which Hartnett's hero invades a police station to rescue Gackt. Another great, droll Midnight Movie.

Classic case of style over substance. Best to be described as a futuristic hybrid of noir/martial arts/revenge tail with some comic book touches, and very theatrical, origami sets. It's got a pretty generic, unexciting plot filled with stock characters, but that can be enough if hyper-stylized B movies are your thing.

Tries way too hard to be a Tarantino-style take on martial arts/western movies. Extremely stylistic and mostly enjoyable, it does suffer from some awful narration and a little too much embellishment of a very simple plot.

I don't get it. I really have no idea what the appeal is