Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is set in the middle of the 19th century, as the age of the samurai became unsustainable, and the clash of its values with those of modern politics rendered the former more quaint than noble. Of course, these values were always at least as mythologic as real, but Miike offers a fresh take on the familiar theme of competing notions of duty: service to authority versus honor in the face of the immorality of those in authority. The film opens with a graphic, yet almost bloodless, act of harakiri. The camera lingers on the man’s face, but the sound of the blade tearing at his insides is powerfully gruesome. The story follows a band of samurai who take it upon themselves to assassinate the half-brother of the Shogun, a man whose careless brutality threatens the entire social order. Much of the film is taken up with the recruitment of the assassins, and their own internal moral debates, but the final 35 minutes is a tour de force of swordplay. The 13 take on close to 200 retainers without the noticeable help of CGI. The quiet dignity of the samurai, as they face near certain death in their quest to rid Japan of a madman, is hardly original to the genre, but somehow it works here. I have often found Miike to go way over the top in his films, for my taste at least, but he gets this one just right.
A quick word about the previews on the DVD for 13 Assassins. There was Hobo with a Shotgun, starring Rutger Hauer in the title role, an extraordinary movie called Rubber, about a killer tire (yes, the thing you put on the wheels of your car), and a bizarre and macabre horror flick starring David Hyde Pierce and entitled Perfect Host. Watching these was like being invited to an evening of grindhouse with Quentin Tarantino.