For five thousand years, it was not meant to be awakened. For five thousand years, it was not meant to be awakened. For five thousand years...

I must've heard that phrase (or whatever the hell else they said) three times in the first ten minutes. Which is really, really stupid. Okay, so basically the plot is something about the card game, which is all the movie really is about. They spend a whole bunch of time explaining the cards that are played ("I'm playing Deck Virus or whatever! This means that you lose ten cards and it gets really annoying when I keep explaining everything! By the way, your shoe's untied! Ha ha ha! It wasn't! That's the joke, right? I told you your shoe was untied and it wasn't! I'm so witty! Why do I keep doing speed balls?"), which gets VERY daunting. The movie sucked, seriously, although I'm sure Roger Ebert just had a blast.

Anyway, this is probably the worst movie I've ever seen; at the very least, it's the worst I've seen in a while. Right up there with Mystic River and The Dark Avenger. See it if you want to understand the way suicidal people's minds work. Otherwise, go see ANYTHING else.

Unless, of course, you enjoy being bombarded by senseless images and explanations of a card game.

Suddenly this movie came back to me in a flash- of what I tried to watch of it, anyway. At the time I actually saw it in the theater (snuck in of course), hoping maybe that the film might be slightly different from the one-sided approach on the TV show that makes Pokemon look like Miyazaki. I knew that there was also a whole big trading card side to the whole shebang, but that maybe the filmmakers might forgo that for an actual story or at least one or two characters to have some sort of interest in (at least in Pokemon there was the villains out to stop Pikachu and those other kids). After about 30 minutes of the film, I started to get the same sensation I felt having seen Digimon in the theater years before- the sensation of being numbed by over-the-top, hideous displays of anime via lots and lots and lots of battles between characters that I couldn't give a hoot about. So much is invested into making the card-players with their animals fight off incredibly stylish and colorful, which here and there it was, they forgot that they're making a movie.

If it was something just short and small to show at an anime or comic-book convention, fine, but not for 90 minutes! After said 30 minutes, I did a rarity on my part which was to walk out, feeling that even though something was sort of going on with the character of Yugi- going into Egypt for some rare creature to face off or whatever- there wasn't anything really to see more of that I didn't already get bombarded with already. It's got more flashy gimmicks than a magician hopped up on 10 cups of Starbucks, but nothing really goes on that redeems all of this with content. For the fan-boys of the series or the cards or maybe for the most die-hard of (KIDS) anime shows and flicks it might be worth a look, or a glance, though its current status on the IMDb bottom 100 is not really without merit. Pretty disposable as I remember it.

This film is a solid continuation of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TV series. Perhaps by today's standards I would see all the issues with the film, but at the time I watched it, I was quite engrossed. It ties in more of its ancient Egyptian mysteries with exciting battles and higher stakes.