Hidden Fortress: The Last Princess   Starring: Jun Matsumoto, Kippei Shiina, Masami Nagasawa 4Digital Media RRP: £15.99 ASIA3815 Certificate: 15 Available 28 June 2010

When her province is conquered and overrun, Princess Yuki-hime and her loyal general Makabe Rokurota have to enlist the help of two squabbling peasants to pose as wood carriers so that they might smuggle the lands war chest, in the form of small gold bars hidden in their bundles. As they travel the land the impact of the war on ordinary people is brought home to the princess...

Hidden Fortress: The Last Princess (2008 - 1 hr, 58 min, 08 sec) is a remake of an Akira Kurosawa film for which he wrote the original screenplay. To mark its fiftieth anniversary Shinji Higuchi directed an updated version of the story, a move which will no doubt have Kurosawa aficionados retching in the aisles. The original film has latterly become famous because George Lucas was inspired by the relationship between the two peasants in creating R2-2D and CP30 for Star Wars - well if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

The film never has a chance if it is compared to the original - Higuchi is no Kurosawa - but taken in isolation the film does have some merits, although the running time is overlong and the middle section of the film is a bit fat and saggy.

Unlike the original film, this version is much more about Takezo and Shinpachi (Miyagawa Daisuke) and adds a completely unnecessary romantic element to the story. Jun Matsumoto (member of the Japanese band Arashi) is surprisingly good in the role of Takezo, although he plays the character with too much of a modern take. Masami Nagasawa makes for an attractive princess, though her predilection for shouting a lot of her lines starts to grate after a short time.

Not that this is a problem, as the idea was not to take a classic and replace the actors with those of equal stature, nope, the whole reason for making the film seems to be to fill it with flashy set pieces, and there are enough of these to keep the pace up for most of the film. Well, what were you expecting? Higuchi was also the man behind The Sinking of Japan (2006) which was long on special effects and short on heart or character... sound familiar?

Although the finished DVD will contain only the original theatrical trailer as an extra, the disc that was supplied was a screener. There is some irony in spending time in watermarking a film whose picture quality was so bad I wouldn’t even have given it away, let alone keep it to add to my collection. The film was sub VHS in quality, so that even the large set pieces and special effects were anything but special. Hopefully the finished disc will be a hell of a lot better than this, otherwise I’m one hundred percent sure I wouldn’t buy it. With a good transfer this would be a pretty fair summer blockbuster type of film.

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Charles Packer