Allow me to apologize for this review taking as long as it did to finally be made. It is a great shame to me as 13 Assassins is utterly fantastic. This is not so much a spoiler, as there’s a magic to the movie. Hit the jump to see what the magic is.
Set at the close of the Edo period, not long before the Meiji restoration, 13 Assassins is at once a tale of revenge and liberation, though it takes a little while to grasp the stakes. Takashi Miike, a jaw-droppingly prolific director who makes several movies a year and is perhaps best known here in America for Audition and Ichi the Killer, plunges right into the action in 13 Assassins. Initially that action is mostly bureaucratic and a question of strategy, one worked out by men plotting in darkened rooms, like the council of elders who convene after the ritual suicide and set the narrative on its course.
The dead man, it emerges, has committed seppuku to protest the baroquely barbaric excesses of Lord Naritsugu, the shogun’s half brother, who’s poised to assume even greater power. Pretty, petty and very likely insane, with a lazy walk and small twitchy smile, Naritsugu is the embodiment of pure imperial decadence. He doesn’t just rape the wife of a minion, he also murders her husband in front of her, hacking at the poor man’s body and lopping off the head with so much force it rolls across the floor. Later, during another convulsion of violence, while murdering a family, Naritsugu will kick a ball across a court and still later will boot another severed head in similar fashion. For him it’s all the same.
These cruelties and others serve as the evidence against Naritsugu, justifying the ensuing violence that will wash blood away with blood. This bloody deluge comes, but all in good time because first Mr. Miike has to round up his avengers, the 13 warriors of the film’s title. It’s a sign of difficult samurai times that the leader of the group, Shinzaemon Shimada, enters perched on a fishing ladder, a pole in his hand. It’s unclear if he’s fishing for food or leisure, but the point is that he’s fishing, not fighting, having resigned himself to a quiet twilight. Like the not especially dirty dozen he assembles, Shinzaemon finds purpose in battle: he becomes a samurai again, with a flashing and wet sword.
That the movie doesn’t surprise is a shock in itself: Miike is known for bizarre humor, a short attention span and a disdain for narrative logic. And yet, his restraint is evident from the very first scene, an elegantly staged seppuku sequence. The director doesn’t show the sword enter the man’s stomach, the resulting wounds, or any internal organs tumbling out. The suicidal noble just sinks quietly into a smear of blood, viewed coolly from above.
The film is something like You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger: where Woody Allen’s woefully movie showed the filmmaker embracing and even rewarding the faithful ones he so mercilessly judged before, 13 Assassins gives Miike a chance to show some respect to the codes of honor he has so regularly subverted throughout his career. He achieves a balance here between revering the samurai way of life and critiquing its absurdities.
As much as it is well-acted, smartly directed and sturdily written, 13 Assassins is also one of Miike’s most visually arresting films, though he has never wanted for an imaginative eye. Kudos are in order for DP Nobuyasu Kita and editor Kenji Yamashita, who work with Miike to keep the film both even-paced and visually engaging. But such excellent touches as Naritsugu’s once-pristine face being covered in blood, dirt, and black mud towards the end of the movie to render him a monstrous visage, exposing the horrid coward that was squealing beneath his perceived calm, is patented Miike. The aforementioned image of Naritsugu carelessly kicking the head of one of his top bodyguards around is also classic Miike, but whereas said image would have been a marginally gruesome moment in the filmmaker’s past works, the action here carries the full weight of dishonor and is met with a quick and requisite punishment.
In the end, when bodies and blood cover every inch of ground, he shows that the way of the warrior isn’t a romantic and diverting fiction but an emblem of a harrowing, brutal reality. If this isn’t his best movie, I have no idea what is.