Beautiful, moving film.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I was a big fan of the original anime, released in 1987. There were absurdly over-the-top, ultraviolent fight scenes. It also had a surprisingly powerful story that touched on obsessive love, egomania, and unjust revenge. So I was thrilled when I found out they made a live-action movie out of it, which I was expecting to have had all the cool stuff taken out of it -- the weird martial arts moves, etc.To my delight, the movie is actually fairly faithful to the anime! I mean come on, the scene with Ken getting impaled on Shin's hand is there. The part where Ken's arms are gushing blood in a high-pressure torrent is there. There's even Jaggy (renamed here as "Jackal") getting the arcane "reroute your blood flow so your head explodes" move done on him. Hell yeah! Quite a lot more than the tepid, oddly irrelevant movie I expected -- something desperately cliché and having little to do with its source material, like "TMNT III." Now I know this movie is dumb, too, but it's somehow dumb in a way that doesn't take itself seriously. Like it's winking at you the whole time saying "look, we both know that no one's gonna pay for a truly accurate Fist of the North Star movie, but this is the closest you're gonna get."

Well well well... Everybody who has watched the anime knows that the authors "copied" their characters from real-life people...Ken from Stallone (say in Cobra); general Falco from WWF wrestler 'rugged' Ronnie Garvin; the 'nanto hawks' from wrestlers Powers of Pain; thug Zeta from wrestler Zeuss (he even got the Z on the bald head in the anime etc )... In the cartoon Julia is a celtic beauty with reddish hair (the last part of the series)... Here we have mestizos with slanted eyes... Many fight scenes look like a bad Van Damme movie and the 'Okuto' high-speed, close range hits look more like metro-sexual guys cat fighting than otherwise. Daniels might be the next Bruce Lee for all I know, and PROBABLY knows his moves since he's been a pro, but in this movie he's worst than most C grade Hong Kong movies. The rest of characters aren't worth mentioning. SFX are very mediocre barren a couple.

Now this is a good adaptation of the original manga and anime, the Producers of Daredevil and Super Mario Bros. can learn something by watching it. It stays fateful to the story without changing any major plot points or characters. I do wish they had the scene where Ken powers up which destroys his shirt and the seven scars glow. But that is really minor compared to the whole movie. They also didn't have the guy that had the energy strings that sliced people like ham. That was cool. Again a minor complaint. This is an exciting and entertaining live action American version and I think fans of the anime will enjoy this.

I was really disappointed with this film. I saw it back in 1996 on the Sci-Fi channel and remembered it being not half-bad. Upon watching it again, I found it to lack many things. I never watched the Anime or read the comics because I am just not into that stuff, but, from what I have read about it, the Anime sounds like it wipes the floor with this poor production.Kenshiro is the hero of the story played by Gary Daniels for some reason. It's funny, I thought Kenshiro was suppose to be Asian, but whatever. Lord Shin, the lead bad guy also played by an American, kidnaps Kenshiro's girl Juliet and leaves Kenshiro for dead after brutally injuring him. What you think would be a classic good vs. evil story gets very boring as nothing happens until the end, and at that point you have already lost interest.I had thought this movie was going to be extremely violent due to the fact that the Anime is suppose to be viciously violent, but, this movie lacks any real action or violence, minus about 3 or 4 scenes. Instead, what we have is a movie that feels like the end of a really bad Trilogy that doesn't exist. Perhaps, if the movie were cast better and had a decent script it would have worked better. And Tony Randel as director was very disappointing considering this is the same guy that directed Hellraiser 2 (one of my all time favorite films).The only plus side of this movie was a pretty decent soundtrack and Chris Penn. The soundtrack was very good considering the movie was very boring. Chris Penn did a cool job with his character and was probably the only real highlight of the film.I guess I need to watch the Anime, even if I don't really like Anime. I would suggest staying away from this movie only if you really like Gary Daniels. 4/10