Takashi Miike is probably the most famous of Japanese directors among western Jmovie fans like me but at the same time probably the most polarizing. Yatterman was crap, Crows Zero 2 was boring and Zebraman 2 parodied all that was good in the first movie. On the other hand he made Ichi the Killer, Gozu, Zebraman, Sun Scarred and Audition, 5 movies I really enjoyed. Watching a Miike movie is like high stakes gambling, either you're gonna get a classic or you just end up wishing some producer would be powerful enough to rein him in.
13 Assassins received a lot of good reviews from festival screenings the world over. Phrases like Miike's best movie and Miike's Kurosawa got me really excited. Ater all, I think Miike works best when he is constrained by a script and not allowed to run loose. What better way to limit Miike than a remake of samurai movie?
The first half of the movie is fucking awesome. Koji Yakusho probably most well known from Shall we Dansu? plays Shinzaemon, a samurai who is tasked with getting rid of the half brother of the Shogun played wonderfully by Inagaki Goro. I would never have thought that guy could play a decent villain after watching his horrible performance in Nagareboshi. This is a revenge movie and like Sun Scarred Miike does a masterful job of making the audience want to see Goro get his comeuppance. It helps that Goro is happy to get his hands dirty and truly make his portrayal of Lord Naritsuga such a despicable character. Miike limits his reputable use of gore and blood in the first half to good effect. I've always said less is more and when you use less at the best time, it has a much stronger effect.
First half is about Shinzaemon gathering his 13 Assassin to kill Goro and Miike does an admirable job of letting the audience know them with of course the main characters getting more screen time. What drives this first half is mostly the desire to see them succeed and the difficulty of killing the Shogun's half brother who is guarded by 70 men.
Shinzaemon and co make a stand at a village and I'm getting ready for what reviews call 40 minutes of superb non-stop action. Then we find out Goro called for reinforcements and now our 13 Assassins have to kill 200 people in order to get to him. 200 people? Really? 70 I can buy. One assassin just needs to kill 5.4 baddies. With 200, its 15.4 people per assassin. Numerical, its not that tall of an order for action movie heroes accept this is 200 people at the same time. Of course, they set traps such as setting crappy cg bulls on fire and huge sliding gates which can magically shut. Not to mention wasting explosives on blowing up a house when they can easily bury it in the ground and blow the legs of 50 people after herding the baddies to the spot. Still, the good guys manage to reduce 200 baddies to 130 after shooting at them with arrows from the roof. Somehow, it never occurred to the Assassins to prepare at least a couple of thousand arrows so they don't need to fight the 130 in hand to hand combat. Still, I can still accept 13 excellent swordsman taking out 10 unskilled peons before they die.
The second half is bloody, violent but way too incoherent. 7 samurai worked because it was 7 guys against a small band of bandits. To tell the story of a fight between 13 dudes against 130 that makes sense requires masterful visual story telling such as a sweeping eagle's view of the village fight to see how the forces are divided and conquered. They've got a built in explanation in that most people in that peaceful era don't really know how to fight with swords but the execution of the fight just felt so haphazard and quickly went downhill after the excellent 'minna koroshi' scene which reminds the audience what the 13 Assassins was fighting for.
To make matters worse, the 13 would need to kill 10 people each to finish off the remaining 130. There are fight scenes where it seems like one dude would kill at least that number so shouldn't the fight have been over in 10 minutes since it took some time before the first assassin feel? Unless of course the guy who mentioned that there were 130 baddies left purposely threw a smaller to give his mates some courage and there are actually 500 which it looked like there were 500 during the final battle. We should have seen quickly dwindling numbers and baddies in great fear 3 minutes into the fight as the 13 Assassins have divided the main force. If you were 1 of 130 baddies, sure you would be confident but if 13 assassins took out 5 people each in the first 3 minutes, 65 people less would be very noticeable especially with the baddies split up and fighting the 13 on separate fronts.
To me, the greatest sin that Miike did in 13 Assassins is the same for all his crap movies; over indulging himself in whatever he wanted to do. In Ryu ga gotoku, he loved the Majima character so much that the main story was a forgotten footnote. In Zebraman 2, he decided instead of continuing to be a homage to tokusatsu, he decided to parody the homage and reduce it to meaningless crap. In 13 Assassins, he got so caught up with making it an uphill battle of 13 vs 200 people that he turned it into a repetitive fight of 13 vs 500. I actually just realised why the fight sequence didn't work for me while skimming it while writing this review. Editing even 5 minutes out of it would have done wonders. The overlong death scenes didn't help either.
If you like the Lone Wolf and cub movies where its just 1 man killing 50, 13 Assassins is for you. The manga on the other hand is more about the story and the fight is just an afterthought. If you like fight scenes that have to make a bit of sense and tell a good story, prepare to be bored. I can't fault Miike for lack of effort but he got too enthusiastic about the final fight and didn't realise his 13 men had actually killed 500 in the movie. I'm actually interested to watch the original to see whether they succeeded in doing the fight. Despite the brilliance of the first half, 13 Assassins is not even close to the classic 7 samurai.
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