Samurai Marathon

Samurai Marathon is set in late feudal Japan, as the arrival of American ships forces the country to reckon with the outside world. The lord of the Annaka domain, Itakura Katsuakira, orders his samurai to run a fifty-eight kilometre race over coast, forest and mountain paths, intending it to shake his warriors out of the inertia of peacetime. It is a test of endurance with a prize attached, but word of the event reaches the central government in Edo, where it is mistaken for something far more threatening, and a party of assassins is dispatched toward Annaka. His spirited daughter Yuki enters the race without his knowledge, while Jinnai Karasawa, a samurai who is in fact an agent of the shogunate, races to head off the killers and clear up the misunderstanding.

Bernard Rose directed, working from a screenplay he wrote with Hiroshi Saito and Kikumi Yamagishi. It is the fourteenth film in his directing career, following Frankenstein, and it was made as a co-production between the United Kingdom and Japan. Takeru Satoh leads as Jinnai, with Nana Komatsu, Mirai Moriyama, Shota Sometani, Munetaka Aoki and Naoto Takenaka among the cast.

Responses to the film have been moderate. On IMDb it holds 6.2 out of 10 from around 1,400 votes, and on TMDB it has 6 out of 10 from a smaller pool of 60 votes, while critics have rated it 6.5 out of 10 across 10 reviews, placing it broadly in line with what general audiences thought of it.