A very disappointing movie that had the potential to be something very cool, with an excellent cast of characters and some cool moves, but ultimately falls on it's face with a terrible story, poor fights and poor execution of the ideas.

Samurai Showdown, like most fighting game anime, is severely lacking in the story department. We have 7 holy warriors with awesome powers, but one of them, Shirou, has betrayed the 7 warriors, leaving only six to fight the evil unleashed by the Shirou and her betrayal to the dark side. Umm, that's it.

Ok, well, I guess the poor story could've been excused if the fight scenes were good, but even those fail to delivery. Almost each fight scene, involves still frames, in which, when a character strikes another character, the scene pauses to a still of that scene. Now, I have no idea why this was done, but it slows done the potential energy that the fights could generate. There is also a lot of jumping, which is just stupid. Also, sometimes the characters' blood is white (?!) and then sometimes it's red. I guess it was done for style, but it looks silly. The last fight is pretty cool, as there are no stills, and it involves quite a few attacks, but that fight comes too late.

Another complaint I have is with the characters. Not with the characters themselves, I think they are nicely designed and each have distinct personalities, but every supporting character is underused. Haohmaru, is the main character, the samurai, but his fights are lacking as his moves are really boring to watch. However, the supporting characters have some excellent moves, such as Nakoruru, the hawk girl or Galford, the dog guy or even Charlotte, the French Knight, but their moves aren't even used more than once or twice in the whole 80 minute movie, and the moves that they use are usually in conjunction with a group attack. Also, some other characters from the video game, who aren't one of the 6 holy warriors, just show up randomly in the movie, for no apparent reason at all. In fact, one character shown fighting in the end credits, doesn't appear in the movie at all!

The English voice acting is, to put it nicely, awful. Let's use a comparison. My cats can show a wider range of emotions than these voice actors and actresses. Haohmaru is terrible, the bad lady sounds way to old, and the dog guy sounds pathetic. (and why does he call the dog, "puppy?") Shirou, overacts so much. Also, it's really grating to listen to these people shouting out attack names too. The girl who voices Nakoruru, at least tries, she is by no means good, but when she says the Japanese attack name, it actually sounds Japanese. And worse yet, when the kids call Haohmaru, they pronounce it "Haohmaruuuuuu." This pronunciation leads me to believe that the samurai is really a kangaroo. Now the other people, in the movie stress the a, "Haaaaaaaaaaaohmaru," which sounds much more Japanese than the previous pronunciation. However, Charlotte is one notable character who does a really good job, with a very believable French accent.

The art is bad too. It lacks detail, and is very drab. The attacks look ok, but they certainly aren't anything special. The backgrounds look pretty bad too. The music is forgettable.

Also, the movie sinks to unbearable levels of clichéd corniness, such as making a speech before dying (you're really adopted. Oh, follow you're destiny. Cough Cough Hack Hack.) and other things such as the stale dialogue or just other annoying things that you would find in any movie. (You killed Mommy and burned my village, it's time for revenge!) It's very unoriginal and clichéd, to put it nicely. (or my favorite, "Secret Move!!!")

There is one good thing about this movie. It does recreate the setting of historic Japan very convincingly. However, when the setting is the only good things about a movie, then you know it's bad.

So, the final verdict, this movie has almost nothing going for it. It's better than Battle Arena Toshinden and Tekken, but not by much. Even the fight scenes, which could've saved this movie, are awful. Unless, you're a diehard fan of the samurai showdown game, I don't recommend you see this. If you want a good samurai movie, with some great action, go see Ninja Scroll.