If there's something missing fromTakashi Miike's remake of 13 Assassins, it's the presence of common people. Its most obvious cinematic forebear, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, bursts at the seams with them, and passed down to its descendent films a sense that as a dying class within feudal Japan, samurai were their protectors. Kurosawa populated his pioneering samurai flicks with a sampling of farmers and merchants and fools; Miike deployed them symbolically to illustrate the distress the corrupt Shogunate has wrought.
Miike saves a lot of screen time by paying lip service to these peasants rather than giving them voices of their own. Depending on who you are, this is a trade-off that streamlines an already balanced, well-paced action-drama––or distinguishes a good film from the great film it could have been.
These representative commoners are few, and they're suffering: here, a woman bereft of her hands, feet and tongue, scrawling with a pen in her mouth that her whole family has been massacred; there, a little boy peeing unabashedly in the middle of a village that is about to be destroyed. They're bloody counterpoints to the silk kimonos and swept palaces of the nobility, and driving the movie is this dialectic between those who rule and those who serve.
It makes sense, then, that the movie is about politics. It begins when the violent nihilist son of the previous Shogun and younger brother of the current Shogun, Matsudaira Naritsugu, receives a promotion. A high-ranking government official, sensing that no good can come of this, recruits trusted samurai Shinzaemon to assassinate Naritsugu. Shinzaemon in turn recruits twelve other samurai to assist him.
By nearly doubling Kurosawa's cast of samurai, Miike draws attention away from the beleaguered peasants and towards his warriors, who are a motley bunch indeed. Some fight for money, some for honor. Others fight for revenge. One fights because he has nothing better to do. The long peace that has reigned in Japan has rendered professional swordsmen almost obsolete, and thus samurai are men of noble birth who must eek out existences as common men: hybrids with a diminishing place in Japan's rigid social structure.
If there are problems with arranging a film like this, you wouldn't know it for all the swordplay. Coherent, smartly choreographed duels and battles help smooth the movie's plot hick-ups, and give it an almost epic gloss. The longest battle, at the end of the movie, is almost 40 minutes long and marred only by the running of some clumsily-animated CGI bulls.
This last scene is exhausting to watch, and make fighting look like real work. Covered from head to foot in blood, sweat and grime, our heroes use guile and skill to destroy a small army, and the effort it takes 13 elite samurai to battle hundreds of semi-skilled warriors is enough to make you sweat in your seat.
There's something cruel about watching this film in light of the recent nuclear power station catastrophe in Fukashima. Discipline, unity of purpose, and sacrifice pay off for Shinzaemon's samurai, and though many don't live to see it, it's implied that their efforts have contributed to the liberalization of the government and better living conditions for the people of Japan. But the nuclear age brought the meaning of our lives and efficacy of our efforts into question: 13 Assassins sometimes feels like a reminder of bygone days when pouring body and soul into a cause meant something.
It's available on NetFlix Instant.
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