Showcase of Tom Cruise's strengths

Rating: 8/10 (8 December 2003)

I found this film surprisingly good, despite the luke-warm reviews (e.g. Variety). The storyline was fairly predictable, but that's fine for this type of genre piece. Tom Cruise is, in my opinion, a fantastic one-trick-pony actor. He portrays the testosterone filled American Alpha-male in all his films, and does it superbly in this one. And yet, it is not pro-American. In fact, it is distinctly anti-American in terms of foreign policy commentary. Only an actor such as Cruise could be capable of pulling this off while still being considered a good American.

The similarities with Dances with Wolves are clearly there, but does this really matter? It's been a long time since Dances and this was a fun story anyway.
The only negative comment that I have on this picture is that Cruise could have let this be more about Katsumoto, who represented the real-life Saigo Takamori, rather than about a completely fictional American military advisor turned rebel. It was only a 1/3 of the way into the film before I realised that Cruise wasn't the Last Samurai and that led me to research the history of the true Last Samurai afterward.