Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: 13 Assassins

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they discuss their thoughts while eating roast rabbit cooked on the flaming back of an enraged bull. This is The Instant Movie Club.

Who’s ready for some bloody samurai violence? This week we’re checking out Takashi Miike’s Japanese action epic 13 Assassins.

Next Week: The Big Bang – Antonio Banderas stars in this film noir alongside the likes of James Van Der Beek and Snoop Dogg.

SPOILERS BELOW

Jeff Hart: One of my favorite film experiences of all time came during college when, over the course of six sessions of a class with a focus I can’t remember, a wonderful but effusive professor screened Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. This professor liked to talk. His in class screenings were like an opportunity for him to lay down his own commentary track, a habit that was only exacerbated by Seven Samurai’s subtitles (we didn’t actually need to hear the dialogue, right?). However, in the case of Kurosawa, his play-by-play was extremely helpful. My professor knew it’d be difficult for us whiteys to differentiate between seven different bald Asian guys, so he assigned each of the samurai nicknames based on their distinguishing characteristics.

Anyway, I bring all that up only because I could’ve really used that professor during Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, which has twice the characters as Seven Samurai packed into half the runtime. Does that translate into 13 Assassins being twice as confusing and half as affecting as Seven Samurai? Yes, but living up to Kurosawa is a tall order. As far as crafting a samurai epic for a generation weaned on stylized blood-letting, Miike’s offering is damn near perfect.

I still went ahead and nicknamed the important members of Miike’s massive cast, so if you’re planning on watching 13 Assassins after reading this, you might want to print the following out as a cheat sheet. There’s the Master Samurai, his Nephew, the Second-in-Command, the Old Dude That Uses a Spear, the Really Young Samurai, the Wild Man (whose anti-samurai monologues closely resemble those delivered by Toshiro Mifune more than 50 years ago), and the Badass Eric Roberts Samurai (whose insane badassery calls to mind the unstoppable swordsman of Seven Samurai). And then there are six other dudes that don’t really matter, except as meat to be brutally cut apart.

There’s plenty of feudal Japan politics at play in 13 Assassins, and there’s a similar pointlessness of violence message as Kurosawa delivered in Seven Samurai (although with Miike’s uber-evil weekend warrior antagonist, the death is perhaps more necessary). 13 Assassins has more of a brain than some of Miike’s prior work, but the heart of the movie is still the epic and gory siege sequence that takes up the film’s entire second half. It’s a thrilling hour, with Miike wisely breaking up the congested hack-and-slash melees with clever set-pieces. Is some of the drama lessened by half of Miike’s cast being interchangeable? Of course. But, it builds to a trio of sequences that pair killer action with surprising poignancy.

Will film students be studying 13 Assassins in 50 years? No, they’ll probably still be pouring over Kurosawa’s superior epic. But, as far as entries into the samurai canon go, 13 Assassins seems second only to one.

Want some, get some.

Jeremiah White:  The problem with the confusion that permeates the final battle of 13 Assassins isn’t so much that the characters are hard to tell apart, which they are. It’s that there really isn’t much to differentiate them other than the roles that Jeff’s nicknames nicely encapsulate. Miike gives his warriors nice introductions that clearly identify most of them, but beyond that, the film’s first half spends more time establishing the Big Bad as a really horrible person and detailing the political machinations that lead to the assassination attempt than developing characters. Multiple scenes highlighting the bad guy’s cruelty seem unnecessary, and the political dealings are far less interesting to me than the single scene of Old Dude Who Uses a Spear explaining why he wants money up front.

Fortunately, the lengthy siege is enjoyable regardless of the buildup. As Jeff points out, the action is wisely broken up into smaller skirmishes, first emphasizing the cunning of our outnumbered heroes as they spring traps from rooftops, and then their supreme badassery as they unsheathe their swords and enter the melee. Not only is Miike capable of making this town-enveloping war easily digestible, he also continues to develop the central themes of violence, honor and duty. The ideas tossed around by Wild Man, Master Samurai, Nephew and the bad guy’s bodyguard continue to advance the samurai talk that runs through the whole movie. The fact that they do so amidst intense bloodshed is just a bonus.

Not only does the final battle succeed in spite of what I thought was a somewhat boring first half, it actually fixes one of the things I found most disappointing. The Big Bad spends the early parts of the movie as nothing more than a sadistic sociopath, boring in his inhumanity. But he blossoms during the climax. He becomes far more interesting and understandable as he relishes the excitement of battle and seems almost thankful to have met such a dramatic end. It’s all just a big game to him, but by the film’s end he becomes a sort of perverted reflection of the Master Samurai, who from the onset just hopes for a noble death.

Considering how well things go once the siege begins, I wonder if Miike would have been better off letting it account for even more of the runtime.