So much average

As Good As It Gets

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

A 45 min. straight showdown sequence of swords in bloody battle. 'Nuff said.

This movie was a mixture of battlefield scenes plus a nonsense story. 13 men kills a group of 200 men and there is not a logical story to justify it!! Acting aside, which was not good at all, I could not find a good line in the story. I was expecting another ending for this movie. In my opinion the story is the weakest point in this movie. For example, in the middle of nowhere the group of warriors meet a bandit in their way. He happens to be much better in fight than other Samurais; I don't have any problem with this story, but the story must somehow support this that I can believe it. It was a poor job supporting this and this bandit stay alive at the end. The current rating in IMDb is unbelievable. It is not worth watching.

While most modern action movies feel bloated and overlong, with unnecessary subplots sprouting on every scene, 13 Assassins has the opposite problem. An epic Jidaigeki homaging Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, the film follows veteran warrior Shinzaemon Shimada, entrusted with the task of eliminating a bloodthirsty powerful nobleman, untouchable by the law; Shimada assembles a team of fighters for the dangerous mission.Structure is simple. In the first act, 13 Assassins introduces the major players and displays the nobleman's atrocities (one moment in particular is truly disturbing, cementing the movie's R rating); in the second, Shimada and his men reach an isolated village to prepare the trap, while the nobleman's right-hand man Hanbei attempts to anticipate their moves. The last act is a bloody, pulse-pounding battle which, in spite of its length (over thirty minutes), maintains a great level of tension.While action is spectacular, characterization is lacking. Kôji Yakusho is excellent as Shimada, but only three or four of his men - including his nephew and a clownish bandit who is a clear homage to Seven Samurai's Kikuchiyo - get any kind of development; the rest are simply guys with swords. With deeper characterization, the last battle would have been even more powerful.7/10

Takashi Miike, better known for darkly funny and sadistically violent fare like AUDITION and ICHI THE KILLER, delivers an excellent period samurai film which also comments on the nature of honor, bushido and the concept of the samurai itself. The plot is rather simple: a group of 12 samurai (plus one other person they meet on the way) have decided it's in Japan's best interest to kill a lord with ties to the Shogun. The reason, well-established in early scenes, is because of his reckless disregard for human life. The first half is concerned with how the samurai conceive their plan and the second half is the execution of the plan, which is glorious and bloody. There was a lot of attention paid to the characters and their various motivations, and the story unfolded at a very nice pace: not too fast and not too slow. Also, being a Takashi Miike film, there was a couple of elements which put his stamp on the material (which is a remake). One is a particularly graphic suicide which opens the film, and the other is a naked, limbless woman without a tongue. One thing I did like about the movie was the meta-comments that were made on the concepts of bushido and the samurai, which completely removed any romanticism that might have at one point been associated with them. These ideas are expressed mainly through the 13th assassin and the lord (Naritsugu) who they're on a mission to kill. In such a stunning film, the only thing I can really complain about are some obvious CGI bulls (which are on fire) that appear in the second half. Other than that, this is an impressive movie no matter which way you look at it. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Japanese samurai films.