Tornado
Samurai swords in Scotland in the 1700s. Like his debut, Slow West, John Maclean’s follow-up Tornado is a grand chase movie held together by not much at all. In this case a simple plot about a young Japanese woman on the run from some vagabonds who want their gold back. Simple stuff. Akira Kurosawa is in here, so is Sergio Leone. It’s very elemental. Archetypal, you could say, an arthouse western in an unlikely setting. What the men chasing Tornado (Kōki) don’t fully understand is how skilled this slip of a girl is when it comes to wielding a honed blade, but they will, when they back her into a corner in the … Read more
