As most movies seem to be, Yamada: Way of the Samurai is loosely based on a true story – that of the titular Yamada Nagamasa – a Japanese adventurer who travelled to the Kingdom of Ayothaya (modern day Thailand) and eventually settled there as a governor.

Clearly the colourful life of a Japanese adventurer wasn’t quite interesting enough for filmmaker Nopporn Waitin, and so our Yamada (Seigi Ozeki) is a young samurai fighting for the Thai military, who finds himself the unwitting witness of a nefarious plan to seize power from Thai royalty. Like so many films of this ilk, the man behind the plot (a Japanese officer) has a seemingly unending supply of disposable henchmen to dispatch. It’ll come as no surprise that this will be important later.

Yamada’s knowledge of the plot finds him beaten and bloodied by a band of ninjas, who are fought off at the last minute by a group of mustachioed Ayothyan fighters. He awakens sometime later in their village, and the rest of the film starts to slide into predictability.

Naturally, Yamada’s recuperation involves him slowly understanding and adapting to the Ayothyan way of life. One of it’s most important aspects is its martial art – a form of Muay Thai boxing. Much of the film concerns itself with the samurai learning this new discipline, intermixed with crisp, golden shots of Thai scenery. There’s so many panning shots of Buddha statues and ruined temples that you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching an advert created by the Thailand tourist board.

This thought is quickly washed away once the beatings start. The boxing style of the Ayothyan fighters is brutal to say the least – all kinetic, sharp elbows and stinging blows. The sparring scenes are well constructed, however they suffer from poor sound design – practically every hit sounds identical.

As Yamada earns the trust of the fighters, particularly forming a bond with their leader, it’s easy to see where this is all going. His loyalties turned, our hero ends up fighting the very people he used to be employed by. Sadly, this is where the film lets itself down. We are promised earlier on that if Yamada can combine his skills as a ronin with that of Thai boxing, he’ll become the ultimate warrior. After the best part of an hour of montage scenes of him training sans Katana, when Yamada finally gets into battle he becomes just another samurai. Dispatching his new enemies in sprays of iffy CGI blood, he seems to forget most of what he’s learned, save for the odd elbow to the jaw.

While the martial artists populating the film (many of them real-life MMA fighters) acquit themselves well, you can’t help but feel that it doesn’t quite live up to the colourful life of the real Yamada Nagamasa. Unless you have a particular interest in the fighting styles on show here, this may well feel like just another martial arts film.

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