Skip to main content
Although he's done a bit of everything at this point (that's what happens when you churn out an average of four movies per year), the name Takashi Miike is still associated with a few specific things in the minds of Japanese cult movie fans. Namely, human entrails. And emotional degradation. And the exploitation of social taboos for pitch-black comedic effect. So when fans heard Miike had remade a samurai epic from the 1960s, the assumption was he'd take the genre to bloody, transgressive new extremes. 13 Assassins turns out to be quite the opposite. It is, in fact, a very traditional picture, a reverential throwback to the feudal period pieces of Akira Kurosawa. And here's a bold suggestion: It might be the best of its kind since Kurosawa's 1954 standard-bearer, Seven Samurai.
If Miike wanted to make this into another of his splatterfests, he easily could have. It opens with a man committing seppuku, the Japanese ritual suicide involving self-inflicted disembowelment—the perfect opportunity for Miike to show us guts tumbling out of a stomach. As he does throughout the film, the director chooses suggestion over gore. OK, we do see several decapitated heads rolling away from their bodies, but it's not particularly graphic. For Takashi Miike, this is holding back.
The suicide is an act of protest against Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), the younger brother of a shogun and a sadistic tyrant to whom power has been gifted rather than earned, who rhapsodizes about the magnificence of war while hiding behind a phalanx of soldiers doing the actual fighting. (Gee, that sounds familiar, doesn't it?) He's politically untouchable, so an aging samurai (Koji Yakusho) is recruited to take him out. He assembles a group of 11 others (the 13th is a hunter they run across in the woods) and begins plotting an intricate ambush against Naritsugu and his army of protectors.
Oh, you don't care
about all that story stuff? You just want to know about the action?
Well, it takes over an hour to get there, but once it arrives it's an
exhilarating 45-minute blur of blades and blood and explosions and
flaming bulls (yes, flaming bulls—the CGI is subpar, but it's the
thought that counts). It's a career-defining climax from a filmmaker
who's always known how to orchestrate violence. Only here, he uses his
skill not for shock but for a brutal kind of beauty. It's masterful.
88 SEE IT: 13 Assassins is rated R. It opens Friday at Cinema 21.
WWeek 2015