Where have you gone Toshiro Mifune? Zwick's schtick doesn't click..

Rating: Null/10 (25 December 2003)

You know a movie has seriously missed its mark when a third of the audience (four people in this case) are pleading at the screen for the hero to die so we can please go home. Ah, but what is a great movie? Movie stars, action, spectacle, music swelling, struggle and noble ambition, new worlds unfolding before our eyes. Since The Last Samurai has all that, why is it so insultingly bad?
Let me count the ways. Let's start with that inability for Tom Cruise to just die and get it over with. When the only thing that comes to mind during the battle scenes is the energizer bunny, there is definitely a credibility problem. This may be a spoiler - if that is possible - so don't read on if you haven't figured out that Tom Cruise is the last Samurai. It's not some wimpy Japanese Samurai whose traditions and training go back generations, no no. THEY all die. It is the beleaguered and resigned Cruise who finally redeems all of Japan and NOBLE JAPANESE TRADITION by surrendering to the Emperor, himself, his ego and the last Samurai sword. I thought the Emperor of Japan was going to cry. Do divine Japanese Emperors actually cry? Almost.

This sort of pandering is just one last unbelievable moment in what is an endlessly and insultingly manipulative Hollywood bamboozle. Let's take first the insult to Japan. What exactly does director Edward Zwick, who obviously has a real talent for battle scenes and inspirational stories, believe he is doing better than has been done in a dozen previous Samurai epics? It's one thing to remake the Seven Samurai into The Magnificent Seven. However, it's cultural hubris - to take the Samurai genre and gloss it over Hollywood kitsch and capital. The script telegraphs everything to the point that the only comparison could be Second City or Saturday Night Live. Where the script fails to elicit any emotional impact there are endless close-ups that do nothing, but demand we feel deeply, which is only possible because the maudlin musical theme asserts itself at every turn. The film even concludes on two of these meaningless close-ups and Pavlovian music moments. Is Tom Cruise even going to get the girl in the end of this unlikely epic? The close-ups say `yes'. Does it have anything to do with the story? Not really.
Tom Cruise is a wonderful actor, and he may look too pretty for this part, but even that, I think, is beside the point. The film has Cruise in many a moment of deep and picturesque meditation or blathering clichés as he learns about the nobility of Samurai culture. But these jar against the simple, graceful acting style of the Japanese actors are so capable of going from subtlety to comic exaggeration. It becomes embarrassing, like watching American tourists talk too loud in a quiet Japanese landscape.

In the end the film is no less than an insult to both the Japanese and the American audience. It assumes the story can only be understood with the trappings of Hollywood excess. It's a really bad and obvious script, but, yes, it has its gorgeous scenes. That some legit' critics consider the film as masterful, is as troubling as it is to sit in the audience and feel completely manipulated. Do producers believe the movie audience is so removed from understanding other cultures and other cinemas that we have to be spoon fed formulas and cliff notes? If that's the case we're all in trouble.