A Good Movie Turned Bad

Rating: 4/10 (29 April 2005)

How disappointing that "The Last Samurai" becomes dreadful in its last half, because the first half is quite engaging. This movie is what results when a director with left-leaning sensibilities tries to make a liberal-minded "message" movie without the courage of his own convictions. So the movie is not content to merely show us the crisis facing the Samurai in the face of westernization and letting our sympathies lie with them....Oh no, fearful that an American audience would not take to a film centered around Japanese characters, we have to have a white, hot-shot Hollywood actor to root for, who sweeps in to be our hero. We get a token Japanese hero to root for as well, but guess who remains living at the end of the film? Didn't Kevin Costner already make this movie? Tom Cruise's heart is obviously in the right place. He gives an incredibly earnest performance...and that's part of the problem. He's SO earnest that I never forgot for a second that I was watching Tom Cruise, Mr. Hollywood A-List, feeling self-important for attaching himself to such an important film. Ken Watanabe received heaps of praise for his performance, but I fail to see what the hype is about. And the obligatory love story is just silly---obviously, the movie makers thought so too, because they make only a half-hearted attempt to develop it in the first place.
I loved the message in "The Last Samurai," but I hated the approach taken to the material. It's yet one more movie in which the creators give the audience not one single amount of credit for having a brain; emotions are force-fed to us through superficial means like slow-motion and thundering music. Not comfortable with any amount of ambiguity, all of the Americans except for Tom Cruise have to be evil, and all of the Samurai have to be entirely noble. The film inadvertently makes the point that killing someone with a sword or a bow and arrow makes you a better person than killing someone with a gun, conveniently sidestepping the fact that killing is killing, regardless of how it's done.
My summary: a pretty film with not a brain in its head.
Grade: C-