Surprisingly incoherent and boring

just watch it!

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I expected more but it's not too shabby. As live action films come they are either amazing (lone wolf and cub), terrible (devilman) or goes unrecognised (Ichi the killer) but the crying freeman was neither. While I have not seen the animated version or read the manga for that matter I'm guessing that this swayed a lot from the basic story or was largely condensed. my reason for thinking this is because the story was so basic. A killer falls in love with a woman who sees his face and decides to let her live and the movie is about the consequences of his actions. What we get is your basic 90s action movie with lots of slow motion death sequences to make up runtime. It isn't particularly violent and in my opinion, it suffers because of this it almost feels like it was made for TV. That being sad it wasn't particularly bad for any reason but I can not fully recommend to anyone.

Yo Hinomura (Mark Dacascos) is Freeman, an assassin for the Chinese order The Sons of the Dragons, sent to Canada to deal with the Yakuza who are causing trouble in their homeland. When beautiful artist Emu (Julie Condra) witnesses Yo at work, she becomes his next target, but when the killer comes a-calling, intending to bump off his witness, he winds up falling in love with her instead.There's more than a little of the John Woo about Christophe Gans' live-action manga Crying Freeman: assassins and gangsters with a code of honour, an innocent woman caught in the middle of a bitter feud, lots of juicy bullet squibs, and more ballistic action and swordplay than you can shake a katana at. Of course, that in itself doesn't guarantee a good film, and Crying Freeman does suffer a little from an overly-ponderous tone, not helped by an excess of slow motion (another Woo trademark). There's also a disappointing lack of martial arts from its talented star Mark Dacascos.The good news is, however, that the positives outweighs the negatives: Dacascos puts in a fine central performance as the regretful killer who sheds a tear with every mission, the cinematography is great, the violence is satisfyingly brutal (and suitably balletic), and Gans balances the action and the romance confidently. The result is a stylish film that, while no classic, should still be well worth the time for most action fans.6.5 out of 10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.

CRYING FREEMAN is an okay martial arts flick based on a popular manga comic. Of course, I don't know anything about Japanese manga so I only have the film to go on and can't compare the two, but this is pretty much par for the course for a mid-'90s thriller: it has plenty of stylished action, a storyline involving rival gangsters battling it out, and a romance between the two leads. I enjoyed it, but it's not the rip-roaring action classic I wanted it to be, and I ended up enjoying 1995's other live-action manga adaptation, FIST OF THE NORTH STAR, a lot more.My main problem with CRYING FREEMAN is the action scenes. I wanted to enjoy these, and I thought I would because Mark Dacascos is a fine martial artist; just take a look at the athleticism and fluidity he manages in his fights in DRIVE and you'll see what I mean. Despite the presence of Dacascos in this movie, the action is nothing to get excited about. It's all hyper-stylised a la John Woo and just feels 'blah blah' to me; you see Dacascos leaping through the air with explosions behind him gunning someone down once, you've seen it a hundred times. If I think about an exciting gun action film I think HARD-BOILED, and this movie is no HARD-BOILED. When the action is slowed down here, I just get bored.Still, it has a mildly interesting storyline and some not-bad acting, including the guy playing a tough Japanese mob boss, brief turns from veteran star Mako (CONAN THE BARBARIAN) and COMMANDO actress Rae Dawn Chong and rent-a-nasty-Frenchman Tcheky Karyo doing what he does best. Leads Dacascos and Julie Condra ended up getting married in real life after this, so there's definite chemistry between the two of them, as well as some cool battles towards the end to enjoy. The problem is that the next film that director Christophe Gans and Dacascos made together was 2001's BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF, which still stands as a mini masterpiece, and this just another in a long line of dated '90s action flicks.

From what I've seen, this indeed is a good film to watch, I mean Mark dacascos definitely plays a good freeman in this film, the action was a solid B plus, and it had an amazing set of characters, but most importantly i like it for how it simply was more similar and more realistic to the anime itself then just creativity, usually copying story lines from something and owning it isn't good, but it's a good lesson to take and understand, for example, street fighter from 1994, a horrible way to influence people of the game, it was horrible, it didn't focus on ryu at all, the characters weren't the way the were, and the acting was horrible, Dragonball evolution, bad actor and no similar story, and I can't imagine what could happen if they even dare to make horrible films of bleach or naruto, so it's only fair, above all it is a very great film to watch and i praise it for that.