Dreck with a couple of good moments

Rating: 3/10 (22 April 2007)

I remember during the promo phase for this megablockbuster superhit, Zwick and Cruise were sitting at a low table, Japanese style, for an interview with some IFC types. They didn't smile, and held a rigid posture that reeked of pretension, as if to say, "We are involved here in a mighty weighty meaningful respectful project for the ages, and we really really understand this Oriental mystic deepness thing." Well, they don't.
Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai is a good example of stupid writing and ham-fisted acting, typical of all his movies after Risky Business except Magnolia. He's shoved into the role of a masculine hero with a babe on the side. Think of it -- he's a fighter jock sleeping with his aeronautical engineer instructor; he's a pool shark with a girlfriend; he's a race-car driver making it with his doctor. Here, he's a soldier cum Samurai lusting for the widow of a man he killed in battle.
The clichés don't stop there. The tired conceit of a diary is used to shovel soliloquies into the audience's maw between mouthfuls of popcorn and Sno-Caps. "These are the most disciplined people I've ever seen," Cruise narrates in a voice-over. Later, he says, "These people are really spiritual!" Unable to comprehend discipline or spirituality, the writers choose not to illuminate the concepts with dramatic subtext and action, but simply to include the two words.
At one point Cruise, who is in love with the widow of a man he killed, is presented with a dramatic opportunity fraught with promise. He sits down next to her on a tatami when she is alone. Close-up on Cruise's painfully wrinkled brow, connoting deep thought and painful deep emotion. "I'm sorry," he says, in a deeply pained voice, "... your husband." Does he help her, do something for her, dedicate himself to her or provide an active indication of his sorrow? No, he dumps a word on her over a cup of tea.
At another point, a young man tells him to fight with "no mind." So he mouths the words "no mind" whenever he fights from then on. Instead of truly creating a condition of no mind, he fills his brain with the words, "NO MIND." Evidently, it's a shallow vessel but quite deep enough to contain oodles of on-the-nose monologue.
Sitting through over two hours of these missed opportunities is bad enough, but at the end you'll be pummeled by the Hollywood happy machine on steroidal overdrive. The weak Emperor suddenly grows strong. The deeply corrupt minister is defeated. The downtrodden masses (referred to as "the masses") are given land. The mortally wounded Cruise is revived. The Japanese widow who spurns him suddenly drips with lust at his smile. Two malicious officers become Samurai supporters. Even the opposing army genuflects to their victims. All to a saccharine voice-over track with swelling music.
One of the peak experiences of my movie life took place a few years back when the Music Box Theatre in Chicago held a month-long Kurosawa/Tifune festival, playing every film made by the pair. For weeks, I swam in a sea of artistic brilliance. When I heard that Cruise and Zwick were making a samurai film, I dreaded the anticlimax, knowing that economic forces coupled with a general lack of thematic depth in their oeuvres would probably create a marginal work with lots of production and no guts.
It was worse than I thought, and Roger Ebert awarded it 3-1/2 stars.