4/5 stars
In Last Samurai Standing, 292 fighters from across the land assemble for a merciless showdown to the death in the late 19th century, at the dawn of Japan’s transformative Meiji period (1868-1912).
Adapted from the novel by Shogo Imamura, which he also serialised as a seinen manga, Netflix’s rollicking new action series unspools like a period reinterpretation of Squid Game, as the country’s most fearsome samurai battle for a prize pot of 100 billion yen.
Junichi Okada stars, produces and serves as the show’s action director, staging a deluge of breathless, innovative sword fights and skirmishes between formidable characters played by Masahiro Higashide, Shota Sometani, Kaya Kiyohara, Yumia Fujisaki and Hideaki Ito, to name just a few.
Over the course of a desperate sprint from Kyoto’s Tenryu-ji temple to the Japanese capital, Tokyo, the show slowly reveals the tortured backstories and varied motivations of these marginalised warriors.
AloJapan.com