Approaching Zatoichi, the latest film from director Beat Takeshi and his most successful to date on his home turf, from a western perspective is almost always going produce a different response from a Japanese one. The original Zatoichi films are famous in Japan and many are very highly regarded (and indeed contain some cinematically awe-inspiring fight sequences), whereas in the UK at least these films remain almost unseen and largely unknown. Thus a Japanese audience is inevitably going to approach this new film as a remake of fondly regarded works from the past, whereas a UK audience is coming at it relatively fresh, and here its most commercially significant element is undoubtedly its director/star, whose track record of electrifying Yakuza films such as Boiling Point and Sonatine, humanist dramas with a comic edge such as A Scene at the Sea and Kikujiro, the extraordinary combination of violence, comedy and tenderness that was Hana-Bi, and the bold and compellingly experimental Dolls, has built him a solid fan base and made him one of the most consistently compelling film-makers working today.

Blind masseur Zatoichi wanders the countryside, fighting anyone who stands against him, helping those in need of assistance and gambling. By chance he falls in with the kind-hearted O-Ume and her hapless nephew Shinkichi, and through him encounters geishas O-Kinu and O-Sei, who have returned to the town to seek revenge for the murder of their family ten years earlier at the hands of a ruthless Ginzo gang. Also in town is skilled ronin Hattori, who to aid his ailing wife becomes a bodyguard for to the Ginzo boss, putting him in inevitable conflict with the two determined geishas and their blind but deadly companion.

The first thing that strikes you here about Takeshi the director is how evenly he distributes the characters' on-screen time. Were it not for the fact that Zatoichi is the title of the film, you would often be pushed to regard him as the central character, though the opening and closing shots belong to him alone. But this is not the story of just one man, and all of the main characters are given pretty much equal screen time, resulting in an ensemble piece in which Zatoichi is a key player, but neither the only or, for the most part, the main one. His gambling scenes aside, he tends to hover in the background and let the other stories play out, until the need for confrontation and action catapults him into centre stage.

The second point is a noticeable shift in Takeshi's handling of action. Violence has been a key element of many of the director's previous films, and he has often been very direct about its presentation - the physical assaults in Boiling Point, the stand-up bar-room gunfight in Sonatine, any number of shoot-outs in Brother - and there has always been an unfussy brutality to these scenes, which have little of the choreographed quality of Sam Peckinpah or Hong Kong action cinema, instead having an almost observational feel them. Increasingly, though, Takeshi has balanced this with what has become a signature use of editing in which the violence itself is not shown at all - instead he presents the set-up, then cuts straight to the consequences. Mind you, the acts in question are sometimes horrible enough in themselves to warrant this approach - in particular the chopsticks that are stabbed into a Yakuza's eye in Hana-Bi and slammed up the noses of a rival gang member in Brother do not need to be seen to send shudders down the spine. More often Takeshi uses this trick for comic effect: the burning of the teacher's new car and the confrontation with the big guy at the boxing hall in Kids Return, and the hilarious near drowning at the hotel swimming pool in Kikujiro. Its comic use is still here - Zatoichi throwing a log and knocking out the samurai wannabe who spends his days charging around the outside of the house - but the violence is brutal, explicit, and shot and edited with sometimes electrifying energy and economy.

This is not Hong Kong action cinema of the sort lifted by Tarantino et al, but Japanese action cinema in the classic style, where fights can be settled not with extended swordplay and a great deal of leaping around, but with a single, perfectly judged blow. Thus those expecting a big climactic battle may be in for a surprise, but for anyone who knows their Japanese cinema, this will prompt a fond twinge of recognition, irresistibly recalling the climactic stand-off in Kurosawa's Sanjuro. Indeed, a Kurosawa influence can be felt throughout the film, with settings, story elements, a rain-drenched sword fight and a comic training sequence echoing Seven Samurai, and the band of outsiders that Zatoichi finds himself part of having the same flavour as the rag-tag group of adventurers in The Hidden Fortress, complete, of course, with a master swordsman. It is to Kitano's credit that these never feel like they have been poached, unlike any number of recent American martial-arts influenced works.

Where the two really part company, and where Kitano's film very much is rooted in modern cinema, is in the spilled blood and explicit violence of the swordplay, and here the director employs what for him must be a first - CGI. This does add a dimensional physicality to the fights, as swords thrust backwards burst out through the bodies of their victims, and in one memorably wince-inducing moment, cut down the shaft of an opponent's weapon and slice off part of his hand. That he has employed these techniques is not that surprising, given their ludicrous over-usage in American action films of late (The Matrix trilogy in particular) - what is surprising is that some of the effects here aren't actually that convincing. Early on a sword bursts out of the back of a would-be assailant and pauses just long enough for you to see the wobble that indicates an effect not completely matched with the live action it has been matted on to. But this is the curse of action-based CGI - if not done perfectly, it looks a little false, but even when it is convincingly executed, the often ludicrous nature of the action being depicted still brands it as fake, just glossily so.

But if the CGI sometimes fails to fully convince, this is a very small fly in some rather gorgeous ointment. Zatoichi still very much bears the director's distinctive stamp, most especially in the prominence given to who the characters are, what their history and motivation is within the framework of the story, rather than what they do to each other. In particular, the vengeful sister and her geisha-dressed brother have a compellingly handled back story, and one based in part, I am assured by a close Japanese friend, on a factual and well documented case. Even Hattori, the supposed villain of the piece, is sympathetically presented, a ronin fighting not out of greed or malice, but to find money to help his sick wife, and Kitano adds a level of layering through the introduction of a character who acts as a bad guy within Hattori's own story, blurring the concept of hero and villain so beloved of western cinema.

Kitano delights in offbeat background characters and in fully rounded and engaging lead players, and the film is well served by an excellent cast, including Kitano himself. As Zatoichi, the enigmatic director/actor manages to avoid the intimidating ghost of Sintaro Katsu and make it pretty his own, his close-eyed twitchiness and shuffling walk presenting an unlikely-looking action hero, but when he does spring into action it is something to see, and his movements are as precise and athletic as a man half his age. As his eventual opponent Hattori, Tadanobu Asano (who appeared with Takeshi in Oshima's Gohatto) cuts an imposing figure and is utterly believable as the driven and dangerously skillful ronin. As the two geishas O-Kinu and O-Sei, Yuuko Daike and Daigoro Tachibana bring an emotional gravitas to well written and fascinating characters, and as the motherly O-Ume, Michiyo Ookuso displays a no-nonsense strength of character that shines in her strong features and her confident body language and line delivery.

Being a Kitano film, as well as a Zatoichi one, the violence is tempered by moments of sometimes broad character humour: the aforementioned training sequence in which the film's hapless comic foil Shinkichi attempts to train a group of dopey locals in the art of combat, only to be repeatedly hit on the head by them; O-Ume's amused reaction to Zatoichi's made-up fake eyes; the ambitious pair who want to try their new sword out on a passing blind man (guess who) and suffer the consequences; the warrior who, in his enthusiasm to attack Zatoichi, draws his sword with such gusto it cuts his friend's arm. None of which prepares you for the finale, a musical tap-dance number choreographed by the dance group The Stripes, a real gamble on Takeshi's part that, astonishingly, comes off wonderfully, in no small part due to the skill of the dancers, the intoxicating rhythms of the music and the whole scene's thundering exuberance. Its arrival is actually telegraphed by two earlier glimpses of four peasants in a rice field (actually the dancers), first rhythmically working the crops, then madly dancing; later they are seen building a stage for the festival with tools that hammer, saw and scrape out a beat, their music matched by Kitano's tuneful camera placement and editing. Indeed, it was apparently the need to match a musical score to these already set rhythms that saw Takeshi for the first time break with long-time music collaborator Joe Hisaishi in favour of Keiichi Suzuki, who provides a splendid score throughout, but really comes into his own in the final scene.

Zatoichi looks great on a first viewing, but four screenings later I was in love with the film. With the rise of younger Japanese directors such as Hideo Nakata, Takashi Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi still manages to make films that are so distinctive, so inventive, so beautifully developed and realised, that despite being his potential old man status, he remains as fresh a talent as the day he first turned to cinema as a medium of artistic expression. Zatoichi is probably his most commercially minded feature yet, and in some ways his most accessible for western audiences, but that should not be taken as a criticism. With Zatoichi, Takeshi has found possibly the ideal way to blend the historical, the traditional, the populist and the artistic elements of Japanese cinema in a single, really rather wonderful package.

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