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Movie Review: The Blind Swordsman's Revenge (Zatoichi nidan-giri)

This week's Zatoichi movie contained what I now understand to be the classic elements of a Zatoichi movie: Zatoichi reluctantly becoming involved in combat in order to help someone out of trouble, gambling, lots of sake drinking, and a few fight scenes. Here we get another corrupt local official working with the criminal underground, this time forcing local girls to work in a brothel. They also killed Zatoichi's former master, so he has double the motivation to help out this time. The primary combat challenger this time is a samurai who only longs to find someone to fight as good or better than himself, which he finally gets to do. The more interesting storyline this time is a dice thrower working for the crime boss. He also has a young daughter that plays an important part of what happens throughout. Ultimately we get to see Zatoichi's tolerance for the difficult situations people face in life, which is nice, since he can pretty much follow the virtuous path without much trouble since he can kick anyone's ass in a fight (verbal or physical) if he needs to. Not as interesting as the last one to me, but I do want to see if I am reading the common elements correctly. Luckily, IFC seems to be keeping up on the showings.