"13 Assassins" Review

  
    Takashi Miike’s “13 Assassins” has what Orson Welles described as a “star part” in the play “Mister Wu“, where the first act involves characters nervously waiting for the famous Mister Wu for an hour.

    In Miike’s film, the “star part” that everyone waits for is battle. The first hour of the movie introduces us to our antagonist and scene after scene is used to show how psychopathic he is. Everyone, I mean everyone wants him dead. But due to his Shogun lineage, no one can touch him. So a rouge group of samurai (guess how many) are formed to conduct an assassination. We are introduced to all of the samurai, little by little. Some are given more back story than others, though it’s a shame that none of them really do get enough. About one scene each is given to them, mostly to show how they are recruited.

     We are given glimpses of the samurai’s personalities and interesting history but they’re never touched on again. It’s of little importance in the second half, however; around the hour and fifteen minute mark, the good guys confront the bad guy and his band of 200 bodyguards and it takes the rest of the roughly two hour movie until the battle is over. This 45 minute action sequence is what the movie has been building up for, and unlike so, so many action movies, it does not disappoint.

    I’ve only seen one other film by Miike: The very good “Audition”. In that film, Miike manipulates violence in a way to play to the strengths of horror. Here, he plays it to the strengths of an action picture. The action is very controlled. Every shot has a purpose. There is an action and a reaction. He barely moves the camera; I’m not talking about Yasujiro Ozu stillness, but compared to the usual chaotic cinematography we see in action movies these days, this might as well be. The action is long, but the shots are creative, and the characters are all progressing in some way.

    Even in a battle of 213 men, there is never a moment where we cannot understand what is happening and wonder who is fighting who. There is no music during the fight as well, which I think is for the best, as scores too often tell us what to feel in battle moments. Here, war makes its own music through the clashing of swords and screams. The movie is bloody but not gratuitous: Quick bursts of blood come after the slice of a sword. Stab wounds cover the mounting dead throughout, a stream slowly turns to blood. This is not glorifying battle sequences, which is in part why it succeeds. We follow the samurai and we feel every moment. The battle, again, lasts a good forty minutes, yet like many great scenes, it flies by. Needless to say that it culminates in a duel that is more intense than most Mexican standoffs in film.

    I have a fondness for Samurai movies; Samurai make for interesting and heroic characters and their strong beliefs are a fascinating look at another time and culture and are able to be used as a template for a broad range of stories from Masaki Kobayashi’s “Samurai Rebellion” and “Harakiri”, which deal with the injustices of the government at the time, to Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon”, that explores our own human perception. Undoubtedly this movie will bring thoughts of Kurosawa’s classic “Seven Samurai” to mind. Like “13 Assassins”, the film is about the formation of a small group of samurai that ends with an epic fight sequence with a much larger group of adversaries. While this movie does not reach the same level of greatness as Kurosawa’s, it is still a well made action movie. We get a horrifying villain, a noble hero and a battle that continues to progress the story rather than stopping it dead in its tracks. This is what more action movies need to be like.

Rating:  3/4