This samurai adventure from the prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike starts off being slightly confusing, with a bunch of characters being quickly introduced. But it actually follows the familiar formula, pioneered by The Seven Samurai and followed by The Dirty Dozen, Ocean’s Eleven, and so on, of having a cast of heroes join together to defeat a common enemy. That enemy is also a samurai, one poised to wield political power cruelly, but that’s of secondary performance once established. The second act is sort of a road movie, albeit one without motor vehicles, or any vehicles at all, as the assassins plan to meet the enemy. It’s occasionally gruesome, but with a minimum of actual battle scenes. The third act, the finale, is the payoff, at least if you like watching spectacular mass battle scenes with the dirty dozen plus one vastly outnumbered. Besides lots and lots of swordplay, some novel battle techniques aid the underdogs.
The film’s most notewortthy aspect is serving as an antidote to many of the mythic Asian period films that make warriors and aristocracy into larger-than-life figures, not to mention the sentimentalizing Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai. (It suggests that many samurai weren’t really great fighters, and least one of the warriors turns out to be scared of bugs.) This is set a few decades earlier than the Cruise drama* but also explicitly deals with the impending decline of the samurai. Despite having samurai protagonists, it also depicts the flaws of Japan’s feudal (pre-1867) system. The main characters, in fact, are explicitly violating the code of loyalty in order to protect the people. As the bloody finale foreshadows, that code would soon outlive its usefulness.
*in 1844, coincidentally just one year before the recently released Meeks Cutoff
viewed 5/22/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/23/11
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