Premise – Two recently escaped prisoners meet with a group of Yakuza in a remote forest. The meeting has been planned by an as yet unidentified party. In the wait, one of the Yakuza is shot dead, but surprises everybody when he comes back to life a few minutes later. It seems that the forest has a knack of bringing the dead back to life, perhaps someone should have told the Yakuza before they choose it as their burial ground for unwanted corpses……..

I’m a big fan of Japanese and Hong Kong cinema, from the late 80’s/early 90’s flicks of John Woo, right through the work of ‘Beat’ Takeshi to last years seminal ‘Battle Royale’. Eastern cinema has such a diverse look and feel that I just love sitting and watching what weirdness they throw at me. Versus is a film that doesn’t easily fit into any pigeon hole. It takes parts of many great things including John Woo films, George Romero films, The Matrix and some video game styling, throws them in a blender and hopes that the result will be a cohesive movie. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work out.

What the film does succeed in doing is looking great. It’s a very stylish film with lots (and lots) of action. Whether it’s gunplay, one on one hand combat, sword fighting or massive gory zombie massacres, the film makes every action scene look like a million dollars. In the way that only eastern cinema (with the possible exception of The Matrix) can, the fighting is incredibly kinetic and meticulously choreographed.  Director Kitamura films them beautifully as well; the camera spins around the action, lots of handheld cameras, slow motion, fast cuts and other nice little tricks to extenuate the action.

The film is also incredibly gory, body parts fly around and one character spends the majority of the film missing a hand. The make-up work is very impressive, given the films meager budget. It’s amazing how these low budget Japanese films can create make up effects that make bigger budget US made film look like play time at kindergarten (Star Trek: Nemesis, I’m looking at you). Some truly amazing effects work is to be found in Versus, form the afore mentioned body parts to holes in torsos, holes in heads and severed heads, right down to the basic zombie effects on faces, it’s all great work.

So, the film looks great, but that’s pretty much where the greatness ends. As much as I like action in a movie, I also like things like character development, an intriguing plot and good acting. Versus has none of these things.

It perhaps says something about the film that none of the characters actually have names. As such I can’t run down the cast list telling you how everybody performed because, well, I don’t know who played who. What I can tell you is that for the most part the cast pretty much hams it up. This is a trend that I have noticed in Eastern cinema, you tend to see a lot of overacting from the cast and it is very much the case here. There are two characters in particular in the film that really over act, by the end of the film I was grating my teeth when they were on screen.

As I said Versus is an action packed movie, but apparently there can be such a thing as too much action. The film is two hours long and at least 90% of that time must be taken up by action scenes. If you take into account the thumping, incessant techno soundtrack that usually accompanies these scenes, then you have a movie watching experience which is not unlike watching someone playing a video game. The film usually plays out like this - good guy moves to new part of forest, kills all the zombies, moves onto next level, sorry scene……. The story is straight out of a lame video game as well. It starts of like a familiar zombie flick, but it degenerates into some nonsense about immortals, sacrifices, reincarnation and destinies. I swear I’ve played this film a dozen times before.

Also, at two hours, the film is tortuously long for what it is. Sub plots involving a screaming hit man who goes crazy and ends up alone in the forest and another with the two prison guards who let the prisoners escape drag on and could have easily been cut out. If they had cut these sub plots and shaved about thirty minutes form the running time then we could have been looking at a pretty good Japanese Horror/action film.

As it stands Versus is the very definition of the term ‘style over substance’. It works as an exercise in blistering action and violence, an elongated music video, or a video game without any interactivity. What it doesn’t work as is a movie.