Confused clichés

Rating: 2/10 (28 December 2015)

I started to watch this for something to have on while waiting for football to start. I stayed to finish it because I was fascinated at just how awful the story was and wondered if, at any point there was going to be an attempt at elevation of the story, but no, nothing, never. It's been quite some time since I felt compelled to write a review on IMDb, but when I saw the overwhelmingly positive reviews of this film, I felt duty bound to add balance. Apparently, the director/writer of this film is of the opinion that complete ignorance of a topic shouldn't stand in the way of you making a story about it; not ignorance of the history of WWII or feudal Japan, ignorance of Catholic catechism, or even ignorance of human nature and cognition. None of these things stood in the way of the creation of this truly unbelievable story; and by unbelievable, I mean literally not-believable. Had I desired to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story, which should be the desire of the film maker, this movie continually destroys that suspense through one glaring display of ignorance after another.
In addition to the flaming historical ignorance that composes the plot elements of this movie, there is a complete lack of character development and a story line so facile I must believe that it was conceived by an eight-grader. The most amazing element of this film is that so many high-quality actors devoted the minutes it took them to phone in a basic performance. The child actors were actually better than one often gets, but with such facile material to work with, it's difficult to credit their performances with any redeeming value.