LastingAware The greatest movie ever!

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

mr_scroggins I loved the original Clint Eastwood version and this is an excellent retelling. Few people know how much the Japanese frontier of Hokkaido parallels the American west and this story really takes you inside of that. It is a very different story due to cultural and factual differences, but the core tale rings through. I saw this when it first came out and I re-watched it just the other night. If you like action and drama you owe it to yourself to watch this. Every aspect of this movie including story, acting, directing, and editing is near perfect. This is a true hidden gem.

Martin Bradley What goes around comes around. Just as a fair number of westerns were remakes of classic Japanese Samurai movies so Sang-il Lee's "Unforgiven" is a fairly literal remake of Clint Eastwood's Oscar winner of the same name. Here we may be dealing with samurai but that doesn't disguise the fact that these guys may as well be cowboys and this could be the American West. It's a reasonably exciting and handsome picture, gorgeously shot in widescreen by Norimichi Kasamatsu, but it is also so close to the original it feels almost negligible. Ken Watanabe plays the Eastwood role but it's something of a one-note performance; he lacks Clint's gravitas. This could have been a classic but as it is it's nothing more than a very good copy.

andre_c_taylor Yes - this film has some stunning visuals, but the pace is very slow, the characters are annoying and somewhat ridiculous at times (constantly acting like idiots), and the main character, Jubei, wallows in self-pity for the entire movie, which makes you wish he would just hurry up and die because he is beyond irritating. Such a shame that this remake isn't as good as other Japanese films (Crouching Tiger, House of F Daggers, etc). I really wanted to turn it off so many times in the last hour of the film because the pitiful characters were like fingernails down a chalk board, but I continued to the end and was quite relieved when it was over. Don't waste your time with this film, but if you do, just watch it on mute with something covering the subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Then you can enjoy the visuals, which is the only thing this film has going for it.

ilBuono When a movie is as brilliant as Eastwood's Unforgiven, it's very hard if not impossible to watch its remake with a fresh eye. I tried, but could not succeed. I kept wishing I was watching the original. Not to say it was a bad film, not at all, but there are some major flaws in this movie. First of all, the characters and actors were nowhere as charismatic as in the original. Not that they were bad, but imho they lack the emotional depth and nuance that their predecessors had. While Gene Hackman's role seemed beautifully fleshed out, his Japanese counterpart is merely a psychopath.The film imitates parts from the original at places were they could have strayed off a bit, and vice versa. Sometimes it felt I was watching a western, just with Japanese actors, while I expected it to be a samourai movie. There are scenes from Unforgiven 1 and 2 with matching color palettes, which I think is a shame. Why not go for a totally different approach? Accentuate the differences, not the similarities. But there are scenes in the original that had a lot of punch (eg the final shootout scene), which have been given a different approach and therefore fail.Where it succeeds is the beautiful cinematography, and the conclusion of Japanese Will Munny's character. I also like the symbolic use of the elements like rain and snow.But as said, I'm extremely prejudiced (Eastwood's Unforgiven is one of my favourite movies) and perhaps the viewer who is not familiar with the original will love this one just as well.