a disappointing movie if you have watched Japanese films about samurais

Rating: 1/10 (25 November 2005)

I like Japanese movies and I like movies about samurais and for some reason after I saw the ads I bought a ticket and went to the cinema to watch it. I expected something like the "Shogun" with it holliwoodish but still interesting entertaining exploration of Japanese culture. But what I saw was so cheesy that walking out of the theatre I felt like I start hating Tom Cruise for lurking me into the 2 hour popcorn- for-the-brains show. I always expected Tom Cruise to finally die, but he never did. Instead he went on chopping the samurais (who, supposedly dedicated all their life to the sword fighting art) right and left. The scenes where he trains with the master of sword remind me all those hundreds of cheesy Rambo-Kickboxer movies where the white Americans kick the asses of their Asian adversaries in the field of the martial arts after having trained those arts for some 10 minutes. The movie is quite expensive and has a pretense of being a historical drama, but the plot and the message of it are just way too cheesy. Hollywood clichés are oozing from every scene. The worst part is the ending where Tom Cruise (an Amercian officer who came to teach Japanese the modern Western war technique and subsequently underwent a transformation embracing the "old ways" of noble fighting with the katana sword) together with his noble friends dash in their last suicidal charge with the naked swords right onto the machine guns of emperor's army and... what I see: all Japanese are dead and Tom Cruise is still hanging on, all wounded of course, but alive and with this tremendously heroic face he tries to stand up, alone among the corpses of all his friends. Here the director apparently wants us to cry and sympathize with our hero, but all I felt was a creepy feeling that one might feel when observing something so utterly false and cheap cheesy that you want to shudder. So my verdict is: It is bad, very bad. Even for Tom Cruise.