It’s completely understandable for a samurai movie to want to be like Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. After all, The Seven Samurai is the gold-standard for samurai movies. So I don’t begrudge Takashi Miike for directing a movie, 13 Assassins, that has a lot in common with Kurosawa’s masterpiece. Although both films have a major point of similarity–a band of samurai coming together to defend a town–Miike largely fails where Kurosawa succeeded.
A major difference between 13 Assassins and The Seven Samurai is that the titular assassins of Miike’s film (who are samurai (except for one dude), leading me to wonder if the title is poorly translated for it’s English language release) are not defending a town from bandits. Instead, they are using the defense of a town as a trap to kill a sadistic young lord, who is on his way to become an influential member of the Shogun council. The assassins are essentially playing a game of cat-and-mouse, attempting to manipulate the lord’s path and send him directly into their trap. Unfortunately, Miike only focuses on one side of the cat-and-mouse game, which I suppose means it can’t really be called a cat-and-mouse game.
Although at one point we hear that the samurai leading the lord’s escort might be getting the idea that something is up, Miike never tries to engage any sort of real conflict or back-and-forth between the two factions. The bulk of the first half of the film is samurai talking, pointing at maps, and occasionally hammering logs. Miike had the opportunity to create some tension, but by focusing on the side of the assassins alone, he ignores the potential of the sadist villain and his honorable guard.
Without that tension, the first half of 13 Assassins is pretty boring. There’s a little bit of humour when the assassins enlist the help of a common woodsman, but laughing at poor people (or laughing at poor people laughing at rich people) can only go so far. After about an hour I was a saying to myself, “You know what this movie needs, Shawn? It’s needs some crazy samurai fight scenes.” I was not disappointed.
Although there’s really only one big fight scene in the movie (the assassins do encounter a band of hired thugs early on in their journey, but that’s over so quickly it’s not even worth counting) it’s a doozy of a fight scene. Hundreds of guards versus twelve samurai and the woodsman guy. There are traps laid, all sorts of shit blows up, and then the thirteen assassins get down to the business of kicking some ass. And ass they do kick.
The final showdown of 13 Assassins is the very definition of Shakespearean-in-magnitude. Countless people die, assassins come out of nowhere to save their fellow assassins, and in the end, it comes to a final confrontation between two samurai and the sadistic lord. And like any proper Shakespearean-in-magnitude ending, pretty much everyone dies. Except for one guy, who I was pretty sure died but then showed up at the end all alive and clearly not dead. I don’t know if I wasn’t paying attention well enough or if I’m just racist and can’t tell the difference between Japanese people unless Ichiro! and that chick who played Go-Go in Kill Bill are involved. Or maybe Miike was making some sort of artistic statement about supernatural intervention in bringing about the eventual decline of the shogunate. I can’t really say for sure.
Despite the awesomeness of the fight sequence that ends the movie, 13 Assassins just isn’t all that great. It starts off like Ocean’s 11, but with samurai and there are thirteen of them. Then it becomes like the montage sequence in an episode of the A-Team, you know, the one where the build a tank or something to fight the evil ranchers. Then there’s ten minutes of a Michael Bay movie. Then, finally, we get some crazy samurai fightin’ action. It’s good samurai fightin’ action, really good, but not good enough to make 13 Assassins anything more than a run-of-the-mill samurai action flick. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give 13 Assassins three tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein. If you like samurai movies, then give this movie a shot, but start at the chapter where the sadistic lord and his guard show up in town.
Writing a vampire novel in this day and age must be a daunting undertaking for any self-respecting artiste. No matter how dark, dirty, and violent you make your vampires, there’s always going to be a comparison to Twilight. And if you want to recreate the image of vampires, casting them as near-regular people, rather than undead supernatural monsters, then you’re basically begging to be lumped in with the other trash on the “
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