REVIEW: Elegant, Brutal 13 Assassins Keeps the Samurai Spirit Alive

Takashi Miike's samurai adventure 13 Assassins is so beautifully made, it could serve as a model for contemporary American action films. If only. Once you get past the initial intricacies of the plot setup, the story is rather basic: It's mid-19th-century Japan, and a group of underemployed samurai band together to vanquish the shogun's half brother, a power-mad sicko who's been roaming the country inflicting horrific cruelties on its citizens. But the filmmaking is so crisp and precise, and so gorgeous to look at, that the movie shines as a piece of visual storytelling. 13 Assassins, which is being released in select American theaters this week and is available via video on demand as well, is satisfying in an elemental way. And though it's gorgeous on the big screen, thanks to Miike's decisive sense of composition and characterization, it works just as well at home on the smaller one.

It's an era of peace in feudal Japan, which means there aren't many employment opportunities for samurai: When a government higher-up decides that, for the good of the country, the evil Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki) must be dispensed with, he seeks out samurai warrior Shinzaemon Shimada (Kôji Yakusho), who has to be lured out of semi-retirement. (The messenger who's sent to fetch him eventually finds him perched placidly at the top of a tall chair in a lake, fishing.)

Shinzaemon finds the assignment honorable, and as Miike discreetly but effectively lays out two of Naritsugu's misdeeds, you understand why. Shinzaemon puts together a ragtag team of swordsmen that include his own nephew (Takayuki Yamada), a devoted former student (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an impossibly young but touchingly enthusiastic warrior-in-training (Masataka Kubota) and, eventually, a goofball woodsman who, though untrained, proves to be one of the bravest of all (played by Yûsuke Iseya, who resembles a Japanese Adrien Brody). Shinzaemon must lead these men against an old rival-slash-colleague (Masachika Ichimura), who is Naritsugu's head samurai.

Miike, who may be best known in the United States for Audition (1999) and Ichi the Killer (2001), sets the action up meticulously, giving even minor characters -- he is, after all, dealing with 13 guys decked out with swords and robes -- at least a shorthand dash of personality. The color palette here is muted but rich, with lots of gray and mushroom tones. That gives some of Miike's small, specific choices a high degree of graphic clarity: The way, for instance, he shows a fallen swordsmen splayed out on clay soil, surrounded with splotches of blood.

The whole last third of 13 Assassins -- which is a remake of a 1963 film by Eiichi Kudo -- consists of a beautifully sustained combat sequence. Miike doesn't try to get us hepped up on the fighting by using fast, jagged cuts -- he doesn't have to. Every ambush, every instance of hand-to-hand combat, every sword fight, is elegant and cleanly shot. The deaths in 13 Assassins don't always come swiftly or mercilessly -- they're gruesome, dramatic and affecting, which ensures that they mean something within the context of the story. Miike is exceptionally gifted at mapping out fast-moving tableaux of grunting, bloodied men, circling one another with a kind of feral formality, lashing and jabbing at each other in their highly ritualized, high-stakes dance.

13 Assassins obviously owes a debt to Seven Samurai, and Miike is unapologetic about it: The picture does, in places, feel like an unspoken homage to Kurosawa, though it's certainly its own distinct creation. But I wonder if it more closely resembles another end-of-an-era picture, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Like that picture, 13 Assassins features a small group of men, some of them feeling used up and useless, launching a suicide mission against a formidable enemy. The violence in 13 Assassins is graphic and brutal, but never graceless. Miike knows you sometimes have to kill off characters you care about. But the hardest and noblest achievement is that he made you care in the first place.