When I heard that Takeshi Miike had a new movie out, I took the news with the same mix of anticipation and dread I would get were my Brazialian jiu-jitsu teacher to ask me to join him on the mat: I am going to get to watch a master at work, but by the time it’s over I will be sorry that I did.
This is not a slam on Miike’s work, but if you are familiar with his other films, such as Gozu, Ichi the Killer and Audition, then you already know what I am talking about. Miike has made his name with some really squirmy horror movies that give just a glimpse of what an avant garde version of Eli Roth with a stronger stomach for gore and absolutely no sense of Western taboos is capable of. Audition remains one of my favorite horror films ever; and yet I won’t watch it again. He is a pretty prolific director, though, with a few dozen credits to his name so far (not bad for only 50 years old), but not all of them make it stateside. His latest work, 13 Assassins, is one of those exceptions, scoring big at the Toronto film festival last year. It is still on the independent film circuit and is garnering no small number of rave reviews along the way.
13 Assassins is very different from what most Western audiences might be expecting from Miike, as it is a historical epic set near the end of Japan’s feudal era. Lord Naritsugu, the Shogun’s younger brother and soon-to-be number two guy in all of Japan, is a sadistic monster who rapes and kills at will. He says it is to remind the peasantry of how they must fear their masters, but it becomes clear that Naritsugu is simply a psychopath whose station allows him the kind of bloodletting that most serial killers can only dream of. Outraged by Naritsugu’s behavior but unable to take direct action, one lord commits ritual suicide to protest having been wronged by one of Naritsugu’s many crimes. After this, something must be done, and one of the Shogun’s senior bodyguards, the renowned swordsman Shinzaemon, is secretly hired to assassinate Naritsugu.
The rest of the movie plays out predictably, especially to those who have seen Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Shinzaemon recruits or hires another 11 samurai with the plan of ambushing Naritsugu’s procession as he travels across the country to the capital, Edo. Some of the 11 get enough character development, or at least fight distinctively enough, that we can pick them out of a crowd and feel some connection to them. Some are simply redshirts who are part of the gang, and who we can count on to die early, if heroic, deaths. Along the way, Shinzaemon and his crew pick up a 13th member of their party, a hunter named Koyata, whose sheer strangeness and barely civilized appearance make him a show-stealer.
The plan for Shinzaemon’s group is simple enough: arrange for Nartisugu to travel through a small town, which will have been fortified into a maze of traps, obstacles and dead ends. Even though Naritsugu will have a large entourage with him, most of his soldiers are not battle-hardened, whereas every one of Shinzaemon’s group is a proven killer. That, and the terrain, should even the odds for our heroes. When they learn, too late, that Naritsugu has several times more men than expected, the heroes spring their trap anyway. They know none of them are going to survive the attack. Surviving is not the point, and the movie is quick to make that distinction for the audience. For these warriors with no more wars to fight, this suicide mission is a most unexpected blessing. It is their last, best chance to get what any samurai really wants: a glorious and honorable death on the battlefield.
Or do they? Where 13 Assassins deviates from pure chambara action and mayhem is in its quieter moments when the doomed samurai are offered to reflect on their stations in life, and all note how wasted their lives really are. These are people who, to be true to their identity, must live lives that are utterly dispoable. The worth of a samura is at least as much measured by his expendability as by his actual ability. These samurai know it, which is why, when they are not preparing for their attack upon Naritsugu, are lamenting what fools they really are.
That said, such moments are reserved as asides; never do we see any of our heroes having second thoughts or looking for an easy way out. Even the young ones among them who have yet to distinguish themselves in battle have made that mental leap from being a person with a live worth living and being a tool of somebody else’s destruction. It is a mindset most could not adopt even if they wanted to. And throughout the film, we get the feeling that the tragedy of the feudal era’s last days was of those remaining few who had no worthy lords for which to sacrifice their own lives. When we first find Shinzaemon, he is quietly fishing, and thinking about his dead wife. We see what looks like a tranquil scene, but for Shinzaemon, it is a slow-moving hell from which there is no escape until Naritsugu’s crimes demand one.
13 Assassins is 141 minutes long, the last 40 of which are spent in one long battle scene as Shinzaemon and company take on some 200 of Naritsugu’s bodyguards in a spectacle of carnage that feels like if you mashed up the Crazy 88 scene from Kill Bill: Volume 1 and the bridge scene from Saving Private Ryan. Technically, this battle scene is outstanding, and it’s worth watching more than once. In fact, in terms of pure action, this movie offers up some of my favorite martial arts cinema I have ever seen. But in all of the mayhem, you almost – but not quite – lose track of the pathos of these samurai in the first place, both Shinzaemon’s crew as well as the notable samurai who loathe Naritsugu but feel obligated to defend him, anyway. In the hands of a less skilled director, that’s all 13 Assassins would have been: a 100-minute preamble to justify running one of the most balls-out swordfights in modern cinema. But this is a Miike film, and as a result, what we get here is something different. Something more. One by one, the players all fall, as the characters of any worthy samurai tale must, and somehow, Miike manages to impart enough humanity on all of them that by the time it is all over, we feel exhausted. Not by the length of the warfighting, or of the viscera that accompanies it, but at the sheer waste of it all. All those lives, for nothing. And that was the point all along.
DYLMAG Rating: 9
