Dancing With Wolves with sushi - same kind of sentimental guff

Rating: 6/10 (20 March 2011)

Where would Hollywood be without its all-pervading soundtrack? Often, I think, nowhere. It's no secret that the soundtrack is an important element in any film, but when you get a wall-to-wall sentimental swish of sound such as in The Last Samurai, you know the film isn't half as good as its cracked up to be. This is very much Dancing With Wolves with sushi - the noble reactionary Japanese as symbolised by all that noble samurai history and it noble traditions pitted against the venal modernisers who will stop at nothing to drag their country into the modern age and get their filthy hands on all the gold and goodies the modern age will bring them. The Last Samurai is, sadly, despite some well filmed battle films and some great scenery - even the pouring rain is picturesque, don't you know - pretty much standard fair (and it doesn't surprise me that the saintly Roger Ebert gives it four out of five - he made too many elemental errors in too many reviews for me to be able to take him fully seriously any longer). The story is loosely based on a real-life character, a Frenchman called Jules Brunet, who sided with the shogun in a civil war in the late 1860s. This Cruise vehicle inexplicably postpones everything for ten years and in many other ways simplifies the truth. Nothing wrong with filching and then bastardising history as a basis for your film, story, musical or poem - even Shakespeare did it - and I'm sure it can be well done. But when it comes with that mushy wall-to-wall soundtrack and faux profound lines about 'destiny' you know this is art as popcorn entertainment rather than anything more serious. As usual, the IMDb fraternity and, no doubt, it sorority either loved it - awesome and 'so deep' - or hated it. I did neither. The Last Samurai is a competent actioner with Tom Cruise and an absolutely gorgeous woman as the 'love interest', the widow of the samurai warrior he killed. Our Tom starts off living in her house on her brother's orders - her brother is the top dog - and initially threatens to kill herself if he doesn't leave (she thinks he stinks like a pig). But eventually she softens and falls in love with the reformed drunkard and, were this to take place in America, would undoubtedly have 'fixed him a steak' and shown her all her high school pictures. As it is, she insists he wears her dead husband's samurai armour for the final showdown battle with the venal, nasty, two-faced modernisers. Look, The Last Samurai is a great film for a night in with two bottles of Shiraz and loads of nibbles. It's pretty, has Tom Cruise - part of the prettiness - and that wall-to-wall soundtrack I keep banging on about whose sole purpose is to to keep you happy and informed as to what you should be feeling. It might well be your bag. By the way, I really, really doubt Japanses cities had telephone poles and lines littering their streets as this film would have you believe. So ignore them and get on with the soundtrack. Oh, and by the way: in an odd sort of way the casting of Scotsman Billy Connolly as an Irishman sums up that The Last Samurai doesn't quite add up. Connolly's oirish accent keeps slipping into his native Glaswegian within just a few seconds of him opening his mouth. So why couldn't the producers have simply made Connolly's character a Scotsman? Problem solved (well, except for that bloody soundtrack).