"13 Assassins" is the Samurai Epic For a Modern Era

13 Assassins is a film heavily indebted to Akira Kurosawa's classic samurai epic Seven Samurai. It takes the simple premise of bringing together samurai for a noble task and turns it into something more brutal, violent and showy. In the shogunate era of Japan, a number of samurai hatch a desperate scheme to kill a sadistic feudal lord and heir apparent to become shogun. The lord's sadism is displayed to almost excessive gruesomeness within the film's earliest moments that all but belies any attempt to sympathize with him -- although this brutality is fitting for director Takashi Miike, best know for his extreme horror films. The film is surprisingly soulful despite being very one-sided. The fighting is cool, but it's also fairly depressing. The film's primary message is about futility; about how there's essentially no point to this conflict and little to be gained from it. It's a suicide mission. The film has heavy, simplistic storytelling but it uses it in the first hour to establish characters and make us understand their motivations before unleashing a furious, imaginative, and fantastically staged extended action sequence. The film drags in places and could use some trimming down, and a few too many of the titular assassins don't get enough development. But it's that rare action movie that has some things it's trying to work through and think about and that actually earns its hugely entertaining climactic moments. 

Grade: B+