13 Assassins (2010)

Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins is a remake of Eiichi Kudo's 1963 chanbara, and it carries itself like a man who read the assignment and decided the assignment was a sword. Thirteen men, twelve samurai and a hunter, plot to kill a sadistic lord before he ascends to the shogunate council. The setting is 1844, which spares the production any obligation to comment on a living society. Every face on screen is Japanese, because the story is Japanese and unfolds in Japan. We note this for the record, since the record is the only thing we keep.

Lord Naritsugu, the target, tortures and murders with the cheer of a man who has never been refused. The film's politics are feudal, not economic. Shinzaemon's closing argument, that a lord cannot survive without the people beneath him, lands as a mild rebuke to tyrants and to no economic system in particular. It is a sentiment old enough to vote. The last act is a 45-minute battle of arrows, explosives, and mud, and whatever sermonizing exists gets buried under the noise of men dying in a booby-trapped village. We are not being lectured at length. We are being entertained, with a brief pause to feel something.

The women are victims or absences, and the film does not stop to interrogate this. There is no romance, no identity politics, no environmental parable, no casting engineered to flatter a modern viewer. A hunter who may or may not be immortal wanders out of the woods and shrugs off a spear through the neck. This is a period piece about power, honor, and the logistics of ambush. It asks nothing of us but attention, and it earns that attention the old way, through craft. The ledger stays clean. The swords do not.

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Thematic classification: this is a remake of a 1963 film, and nothing else on the list applies. It won no Academy Award, spawned no sequel, adapts no book, depicts no real events, involves no superheroes, and never reached number one at the domestic box office. The swords, once again, do not care.

{"thematic_tags": ["remake"]}