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.

In the first Matrix, Morpheus says to Neo, "C'mon, stop trying to hit me and hit me!" Then, The Matrix went on to spawn an innumerable list of rip-offs and wannabes, including this over-long piece from Japan. All of those things that The Matrix influenced, however, including its own terrible sequels, seemed to have forgotten that line. Mindless action is fun, and has its place. It can also be incredibly frustrating when the sequences are without consequence. Even martial arts movies with terrible story lines at least have set-pieces that actually move the characters towards some objective. For most of the action in this movie, not so much. This is two hours of people in the woods fighting, and the director never seems to really want anyone to die, and even if they do he CERTAINLY wants to make sure he can fit in some more people to join the not-quite carnage.So here's the deal. It may be considered lazy reviewing to try and write a summary for a movie without figuring out what all of the groups involved in the story are, but in this case I pretty much consider it the point of my review that the specifics in this movie do not matter, at all. Some people arrive in a forest. Gangsters, cops, prison escapees, a female hostage, some necromancer semi-vampire eternal dead dude, and zombies. They all fight each other. The point is that this is some recurring, eternal conflict of good and evil, or at least two sides. The main prison escapee dude is the brother of the necromancer dude, and they have had this fight before, but this time around he's "changed" so he might be able to win (read: he's going to win). The female hostage is a seer with the blood of Resurrection that operates in the forest, the Forest of Resurrection, to resurrect things. These things are made clear with what Uwe Boll-like writing there is between the majority of the Michael Bay-like action scenes that drags the playlength of this movie to two hours (a full hour forty over its necessary playlength). I compare the writing to Uwe Boll because the same basic points are reiterated again and again and again, as if the audience has no ability to connect one revelation to another. "Oh this is the Forest of Resurrection, you say? Then this must be the Forest of Resurrection! And if it's the Forest of Resurrection, than those dead guys must be alive! Oh, so THAT'S why those dead guys are alive. Well since those dead guys are alive, we must be in the Forest of Resurrection. What's that, you say? Well it's where we are!" I compare the action to Michael Bay because it's way too in love with the boomerang cam, and because ninety percent of the movement and editing ultimately comes to the same end result: posturing.Let me put it this way: this movie should have been only forty minutes long, but it could have easily been just fifteen, if any character would actually pull the damn trigger or stab the other person when they actually had a chance. Instead, as soon as any character comes into the position to be eliminated, the person he's fighting against just grins and sneers in pleased victory. It was okay the first, erm, three or four times it happened. By a quarter of the way through the movie, however, there was no longer any excuse. If any of these people actually wanted to win the fight, they would have long beforehand. "Stop trying to hit me and hit me"--the motivations of all of the characters are shot when they're no longer fighting for any real reason but just 'cause, you know, they're in this forest thing, of Resurrection y'see, and, have to, do ... stuff. Meh. Roll out next action sequence! Oh, and the Resurrection and re-incarnation plot points pretty much guarantee that this whole thing will never, technically, end. Which becomes the point! Oh God, why?! Why watch a two hour long movie about mindless action scenes with no consequence only to have the point of it be that the action scenes are never supposed to end, it's just posturing for ever and ever and ever? Oh. 'Cause the action's neat. And, like, action-y and stuff. Alright.Not an entire waste of time, but you can honestly fast forward through the majority of this movie and miss nothing.--PolarisDiB

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.

These are questions you should ask yourself if you're planning to watch this movie. 'Cause I read quite a few people here saying they hate Versus, and that it's stupid, that they don't get it, the worst movie they ever saw, and so on... Guess they don't watch a lot of movies. And I'm sure they don't like shooting movies, or they don't like fight movies, or zombie movies, or they don't like any of them - maybe they even don't like movies at all! So, if you're one of these persons, you shouldn't waist your time here - or shouldn't waist this movie with your time. This is about people getting killed or hit, not because it's necessary to the plot, but because it's funny. About characters doing gestures and poses not because they should, but because it's stylish.If you don't like it, well, what a pity! But maybe you should consider that there's nothing wrong with the movie itself, but just a limitation in your ability to appreciate things. I watched this movie during the night and had to control myself all of the time not to laugh so hard I would wake up all of my neighbors.Besides, the fighting is great. The main character is great - probably born in Dostoievski's mind or something. The villain is great. The cop who knows everything is great. I've recommended this movie to all of my friends already. Now I recommend it to you.Watch it, if you do like John Woo and zombie movies. It's great.