13 Assassins: Or “This is Not Your Father’s Seven Samurai”. In the waning days of feudal Japan, a savage noble, Lord Naritsugu, acts with impunity, killing for pleasure, raping whomever he chooses, shoots kids with arrows, he‘s a real swell guy all around. Shinzaemon, a veteran samurai, is hired by the family of one of his victims to assassinate Naritsugu. Shinzaemon gathers together 11 other samurai and one peasant (who may be more than he appears) to attack and kill Naritsugu and his entourage while he is in transit in the countryside, turning a small country village into a death trap to ensnare the lord. But the lord’s entourage, expected by the assassins to be around 70, turns out to be three times as many…but the assassins remain committed to killing all of them. So begins a long running swordfight as the assassins navigate the town and the lord’s soldiers, using swords, slings, arrows, explosives, and anything else they can get their hands on. As expected, with it being a suicide mission, not all the assassins survive the endeavor. While it is bloody (lots of slash, impaling, arrows to the chest, at least one visible sword to the throat), it’s not that gory (the CGI sprays of blood are modest at best). Director Takashi Miike shows atypical restraint with the violence and does a great job with pacing and staging this film, including the bravura battle scene. With the exception of some blatantly fake cgi cows in the battle scene (they are set on fire and sent stampeding through the lord’s soldiers and they look fake as all get out), I have no complaints about the film. It’’s supposedly based on a real incident (the “Sakuradamon Incident”), but I find the parallels tenuous at best (in fact, if you exclude the fact that samurai assassinated someone, there are no parallels at all). Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”
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