Review: Phillip Noyce's Blind Fury.

Blind Fury is a 1989 action-comedy directed by Phillip Noyce and serves as an American remake of the long running Zatoichi film series (more specifically film 17 Zatoichi Challenged), which coincidentally had also ended in 1989.

The film stars Rutger Haur as Vietnam War veteran Nick Parker, who is trained by Vietnamese locals as a blind swordsman, and 20 years later promises a dying mother to reunite her son with his dad, Parker's war buddy Frank Deveraux.

Now, I found out about this film during my research of the Zatoichi series around the time I watched Kitano's version of it, and it hit my watchlist pretty quickly because my thought process was,

Rutger Haur. Okay, I like Rutger Haur. I watch a clip. Okay, seems pretty funny and the action is good. I watch Ebert give it a thumbs up on Siskel & Ebert. Okay, I like Ebert, I'll take his thumbs up into consideration.

And I went in expecting you know, a cheesy fun B-Movie that isn't that good and I came out with a pretty decent action film that I didn't find many glaring flaws with.

I've seen this film referred to as a "tonal rollercoaster" and, yeah, they're not wrong. It goes from serious, to cheese, to serious, to cheese a million times. Does it balance both aspects well? Ehhhh, kinda. But did I enjoy both sides of the film? Hell yeah I did!

The comedy is a lot less forced than other film's of this variety, it relies more on one-liners, semi slapstick, and Parker's blindness. While a couple jokes didn't land with me, I found myself laughing at the film more than I didn't.

One of my favorite bits in the whole film is the entire sequence of Parker driving from the two redneck thugs, which is so over the top that it goes from feeling like it's doing too much right to being a funny scene.

But thankfully this isn't a Last Action Hero cheese-fest, it's still pretty serious and I do enjoy when this film gets tense, because when it did get tense it felt tense. Maybe it was from the music, or the camerawork, but I managed to feel the tension better in this film than I have a couple other films.

I have to say Rutger Haur was a perfect casting for this film, he manages to juggle both playing a badass blind swordsman as well as he does delivering the comedy of this film without falling flat on either aspect. Parker isn't as good or as awesome as Zatoichi, but I would be lying if I said he wasn't awesome in his own right.

When he's focused, he's honestly terrifying. Not in like a "I was scared of him while I watched this film." Kinda terrifying, but in a "Man I would have a heart attack if I saw this guy in person," Kinda way. He's cold, he's ruthless, he's not lightning fast but seeing the blade moving is honestly more intimidating in my opinion.

He, much like Zatoichi, moves like a force of nature. He's fast, his nerves are that of steel, he moves like wind and he just does not stop moving once he gets in a fight. And despite being an American version of Zatoichi, he still remains distinct enough that he's not a complete 1:1 clone of him. 

Really the only thing they have in common are being master swordsmen, sure he gambles but he only gambles once in the whole film, he's not a masseur nor is he being a wandering drifter a huge part of his character.

He is seriously the best part of the film, I loved Parker and I think without Rutger Haur I would have enjoyed this film so much less than I did. He's what separates this film from other films of this era I've seen.

The action is one of the film's strong suits, I've already gone into this only 2 paragraphs up but I only have one real gripe with the action in this film and that it is messy. Not poorly choreographed messy, I mean destruction messy.

Multiple fight scenes (mainly the first and last one fights in the film) are just the room their in just getting diced up, chopped up, shot up, just absolutely eviscerated. And I think it kinda kills the scene for me a little bit. Not a whole lot but when half of the final fight was just tearing up props, I found myself a little disappointed.

All in all, if you like Rutger Haur, Phillip Noyce, Zatoichi, or just cheesy 80s action films, I would recommend this film to you. I enjoyed it much more than most people I've seen and I do understand the flaws this film has, so I can't blame you if you don't like this film.

That's all for now, Love and Peace!