FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

lewiskendell Versus aims to be a stylish, cool action flick with a healthy mixture of gore, gun-play, and martial arts. Unfortunately, a lot of those attempts at being stylish and cool, end up coming off as cheesy. All the silly posing and failed attempts at humor don't do a lot to help Versus, and neither does the fact that the characters are almost universally annoying and uninteresting. The story is something about zombies and resurrection forests and portals to hell. The word "convoluted" comes to mind. The frequent action scenes could have been the movie's saving grace, but they were uniformly uninspired and routine. The gore wasn't funny or copious enough to warrant any attention. The acting is bad. Not "campy bad" or "hilariously bad", just bad. The kind that's difficult to watch.If you couldn't tell, I thoroughly disliked Versus. I've seen a lot of great Japanese action flicks. This wasn't one of them.

gmleafs I have seen a lot of martial arts movies and I am willing to put up with a certain lack of dialogue, bad acting, and poor plot but this movie is ridiculous.When I read that this movie has zombies, hand-to-hand combat, sword fighting and guns I thought to myself how could you screw up a movie like that. Well Versus does just that.The fighting is bad. The scenes are very choppy and it looks more like an American action fighting sequence then what I've come to expect from an Asian fighting sequence. Not only that, but the fight sequences had poor sound and visual effects. I get that this movie is suppose to be like an anime, but even then this would be a poor anime film. The shooting scenes are just as bad. It looked like the characters have never fired a gun in their life.The acting is just as bad. Again, since this is an action fighting movie I don't expect great acting but wow this was bad. To be fair, the lead character was okay, but everyone else looked as dangerous as Napoleon Dynamite. It is not believable to have 120 lbs nerds pretend to look badass. The dialogue was by far the worst. I watched the subtitled version and it seemed like the dialogue was written at a grade 1 level and was delivered at a level lower.I'm not even sure how to comment on the plot. It's easy to follow, but is just horrible. I think they were going for a Highlander movie plot, but if Highlander Endgame gets a 4.4/10 then this movie should be below that. By the end of the movie you really don't care what happens, which favours the ending because it barley makes sense; but by that point in the movie you are so tired of watching it you find yourself saying "sure I guess that makes sense, just please end now." Overall, I would not watch this movie again. In fact, I regret watching it in its entirety once. I don't know why it is rated so high, but this is by far the most overrated movie I have ever seen to date. I have seen independent films with a cast of nobody's and very low budgets produce decent movies so there so that is no excuse for this movie at all.

MBunge If Sam Raimi and gotten drunk when he was 17 and made a movie about Japanese gangsters and zombies, it would have looked a lot like Versus.A couple of escapes from a Japanese prison with "lawbreaker" in English on the front of their prison jumpsuits meet up with a group of Yakuza gangsters in the middle of the forest. T he gangsters are there to pick up the prisoners and help them escape, but insist they wait for another man to arrive. T he prisoners don't care for that, especially one who looks like the boy band version of a badass. Boy Band Badass especially doesn't like it when he finds out the Yakuza have brought a kidnapped girl along with them. They man they're waiting for has plans for her as well, but Boy Band Badass grabs one of the gangsters' guns and demands they let her go. One of the gangsters gets shot dead…and then he comes back to life as a zombie. As Boy Band Badass and the girl flee and the Yakuza pursue, we learn this forest is where the gang has been burying their victims…and they've all come back to life as zombies as well. What follows that is some really crazy stuff as Boy Band Badass fights the Yakuza and they all fight the zombies. Then the man they were all waiting for shows up and we find out this is all some re-enactment of an ancient battle for a dark power of destruction, only this is in modern times and everyone looks like they stepped out of a music video.There is an awful lot of this movie that is laugh out loud goofy. It is never boring, however, and these Japanese filmmakers do know how to film a fight scene. You can actually see what's happening and follow along, rather than the indecipherable blur of jump cuts and microsecond edits that mar most action scenes in American movies. But you can't take anything else in this film at all seriously.If you're high on some illegal or illicit mind-altering substance, you might have a nice trip watching Versus because it's very visually creative. If you'd like something you can bring home and MST3K with your family and friends, Versus might be a nice choice as well. But if you're neither stoned nor snarky, there's not much here to recommend.

BA_Harrison A pair of escaped convicts rendezvous with a group of Yakuza next to a supernatural forest which, unbeknownst to them, has the power to revive the dead. When a gun-fight breaks out between the gangsters and the escapees, Prisoner KSC2-303 (Tak Sakaguchi) runs for cover in the woods, accompanied by a young woman who has been kidnapped by the Yakuza; this proves to be a bad decision, since this is where the gangsters have been burying their victims, and now the dead are returning to life!I love hyper-kinetic, ultra-violent, Manga-inspired sword and gun-fight action as much as the next movie geek, but even I realise that it's possible to have too much of a good thing. Director Ryûhei Kitamura, on the other hand, doesn't seem to understand the concept that, sometimes, less is more.His low-budget Yakuza vs Zombie flick Versus delivers non-stop visual mayhem, which sounds like fun (and for a while, it is), but it ultimately results in tedium. Pacing and narrative coherence go completely out of the window in favour of a non-stop barrage of admittedly impressive battles, cool posturing from the crazy characters, and splattery scenes of cartoonish gore, and by the time Kitamura finally begins to tell anything close to resembling a story (some nonsense about a reincarnated Samurai and his eternal battle against an evil being), it's all a bit too late.5.5 out of 10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.