13 Assassins

A few days after the tragedy of the earthquake in Japan, I found myself watching a samurai movie at SXSW. It was a weird coincidence. I’ve seen a lot of old black and white samurai movies but I haven’t really been paying attention to how the genre has played out in contemporary Japanese cinema. And while the main tropes and archetypes remained the same in this one, the style is decidedly now.

The film “13 Assassins” is about an old samurai given a special mission as the feudal age in Japan is coming to a close. A sociopathic lord has been given dominion over a clan by the shogun and has tortured and mutilated too many people. The samurai is given a secret order to assassinate the lord. First he must cobble together a band of 13 aging and untrained samurai to fight against the lord’s army of guards. The film is deliberately paced. It starts out disturbingly violent and ends the same way, with a slow middle. The third act of the film is intensely brutal. Ultra violence has found its way into a classic cinema form. The directing and acting in the film are impeccable. But it did lose me in a couple places.

While I understand that a comic buffoon may be a classic archetype for samurai films, this time it didn’t work. It took me completely out of the story and reduced it to a silly action movie. Some of the things in the third act are utterly unbelievable, but they wouldn’t have been alienating if they were real. For example, there is a scene involving a stampede of cattle. All the cattle are CGI which has no place in any period movie. It completely took me out of the film and it was impossible to watch with the same intensity. If only they had used real cattle like in the good old days it would have added a lot to the film. But if you are in the mood to watch a brutal samurai bloodbath then look no further.