Very Cool!!!

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Versus aims to be a stylish, cool action flick with a healthy mixture of gore, gun-play, and martial arts. Unfortunately, a lot of those attempts at being stylish and cool, end up coming off as cheesy. All the silly posing and failed attempts at humor don't do a lot to help Versus, and neither does the fact that the characters are almost universally annoying and uninteresting. The story is something about zombies and resurrection forests and portals to hell. The word "convoluted" comes to mind. The frequent action scenes could have been the movie's saving grace, but they were uniformly uninspired and routine. The gore wasn't funny or copious enough to warrant any attention. The acting is bad. Not "campy bad" or "hilariously bad", just bad. The kind that's difficult to watch.If you couldn't tell, I thoroughly disliked Versus. I've seen a lot of great Japanese action flicks. This wasn't one of them.

Let me start by saying that this is the craziest action movie I have ever seen. I don't mean crazy in the sense it has crazy action scenes (it has), or crazy characters (it has..) or a crazy story (it does have...), I mean crazy on the freaking whole, the whole movie is crazy and has a crazy concept, and that is what made it interested and entertaining for me.So basically a group of convicts escapes into a forest to rendezvous with another group of gangstas, the thing goes wrong, there's a double cross, a gunfight... the usual. However, that forest happens to be one of the 666 portals to the other world. I know right? So what does this mean? That the guys who are gonna get killed... aren't really going to die! This gives a whole new meaning to the idea that people die if they are killed.And this brings us to the best shoot-out action and sword fights of zombies versus yakuzas you will ever seen! Well, then there's something about this guy trying to figure out what the hell is going on, rescuing a kidnapped girl, being the chosen one and fighting the forces of evil... at the same time. It's one hell of a complex plot in a plot less movie... What?? This movie is incredibly gory, funny and fast-paced. It IS action-oriented, but it's so much more! It's also a very crazy film if I haven't mentioned it yet and if it's going to do anything to you other than tell you in your face "it's all about the fun" is to entertain you for 2 hours or so.If you like some new and crazy ideas for a not-stop hilarious and action ride, watch this movie with the thought that it's going to be very, very special.

In the first Matrix, Morpheus says to Neo, "C'mon, stop trying to hit me and hit me!" Then, The Matrix went on to spawn an innumerable list of rip-offs and wannabes, including this over-long piece from Japan. All of those things that The Matrix influenced, however, including its own terrible sequels, seemed to have forgotten that line. Mindless action is fun, and has its place. It can also be incredibly frustrating when the sequences are without consequence. Even martial arts movies with terrible story lines at least have set-pieces that actually move the characters towards some objective. For most of the action in this movie, not so much. This is two hours of people in the woods fighting, and the director never seems to really want anyone to die, and even if they do he CERTAINLY wants to make sure he can fit in some more people to join the not-quite carnage.So here's the deal. It may be considered lazy reviewing to try and write a summary for a movie without figuring out what all of the groups involved in the story are, but in this case I pretty much consider it the point of my review that the specifics in this movie do not matter, at all. Some people arrive in a forest. Gangsters, cops, prison escapees, a female hostage, some necromancer semi-vampire eternal dead dude, and zombies. They all fight each other. The point is that this is some recurring, eternal conflict of good and evil, or at least two sides. The main prison escapee dude is the brother of the necromancer dude, and they have had this fight before, but this time around he's "changed" so he might be able to win (read: he's going to win). The female hostage is a seer with the blood of Resurrection that operates in the forest, the Forest of Resurrection, to resurrect things. These things are made clear with what Uwe Boll-like writing there is between the majority of the Michael Bay-like action scenes that drags the playlength of this movie to two hours (a full hour forty over its necessary playlength). I compare the writing to Uwe Boll because the same basic points are reiterated again and again and again, as if the audience has no ability to connect one revelation to another. "Oh this is the Forest of Resurrection, you say? Then this must be the Forest of Resurrection! And if it's the Forest of Resurrection, than those dead guys must be alive! Oh, so THAT'S why those dead guys are alive. Well since those dead guys are alive, we must be in the Forest of Resurrection. What's that, you say? Well it's where we are!" I compare the action to Michael Bay because it's way too in love with the boomerang cam, and because ninety percent of the movement and editing ultimately comes to the same end result: posturing.Let me put it this way: this movie should have been only forty minutes long, but it could have easily been just fifteen, if any character would actually pull the damn trigger or stab the other person when they actually had a chance. Instead, as soon as any character comes into the position to be eliminated, the person he's fighting against just grins and sneers in pleased victory. It was okay the first, erm, three or four times it happened. By a quarter of the way through the movie, however, there was no longer any excuse. If any of these people actually wanted to win the fight, they would have long beforehand. "Stop trying to hit me and hit me"--the motivations of all of the characters are shot when they're no longer fighting for any real reason but just 'cause, you know, they're in this forest thing, of Resurrection y'see, and, have to, do ... stuff. Meh. Roll out next action sequence! Oh, and the Resurrection and re-incarnation plot points pretty much guarantee that this whole thing will never, technically, end. Which becomes the point! Oh God, why?! Why watch a two hour long movie about mindless action scenes with no consequence only to have the point of it be that the action scenes are never supposed to end, it's just posturing for ever and ever and ever? Oh. 'Cause the action's neat. And, like, action-y and stuff. Alright.Not an entire waste of time, but you can honestly fast forward through the majority of this movie and miss nothing.--PolarisDiB

Martial arts and Yakuza and zombies. What a combination. The fact that I watched it after Miyamoto Musashi kanketsuhen: kettô Ganryûjima made it even weirder.Prisoner KSC2-303 (Tak Sakaguchi) escapes from a maximum security prison and is met by the Yakuza, who have a girl (Chieko Misaka) as a hostage. They are waiting for someone else to arrive when everything starts happening. The prisoner and the girl escape to the forest.Now, this is not your ordinary forest, and this is not your ordinary prisoner, and this certainly isn't your ordinary girl.This forest is full of zombies. In fact anyone dying in this forest turns into a zombie. These zombies fight with swords and guns and whatever. You cannot kill them as they will rise again, so it makes for some very long fight scenes. There is an abundance of severed limbs, decapitations, and buckets of blood.The prisoner is ultra-cool and the way he keeps telling the girl to "shut-up" and punching her is funny, and a strange way to act for someone who eventually says, "Don't touch my girl, f*cking asshole." The f*cking asshole is, of course, the uber villain (Kenji Matsuda).Look for some very funny and bizarre characters in Ryuhei Kitamura's film, and lots of action.