13 Assassins - a movie review in which I am very angry
The following exchange took place in my brain today:
Me: Hey I really miss Yamada Takayuki's face how about I watch a movie with him?
Brain: Yeah, how about 13 Assassins where he has all of ten minutes of screentime?
Me:....
Brain: 8D
Me: Alright fine!
So 13 Assassins is a film by Takashi Miike (of "Crows Zero" fame and infamous for my personal experience with "Terraformars"). It's about 13 dudes needing to assassinate a badshit insane evil sadistic guy and... that's... basically it.
SPOILER ALERT FOR "13 ASSASSINS". NO SERIOUSLY I MEAN IT I WILL SPOILER THE ENTIRE FILM.
I had to google all of the protagonists' names again because THERE ARE SO MANY OLD JAPANESE DUDES WITH A BAD HAIRCUT IN THIS MOVIE IT'S KINDA HARD TO KEEP TRACK OF ALL OF THEM.
Okay, so our main evil dude is Lord Naritsugu who is the shogun's half brother and can therefore happily torture, kill, maim and rape his subjects without being held accountable for it. He is about to be granted even greater political power and nobody wants that, so people ask old, honorable samurai Shimada Shinzaemon - our protagonist - to kill the dude.
Instead of Shimada just slipping him some poison and get done with it, he instead finds himself eleven people and cobbles together the most convoluted bullshit execution plan ever, where he will buy an entire mountain village, lure the evil lord there and then fight him with a dozen men. It also involves burning cows and this could have been engaging - if maybe this was a comedy and not a Serious Samurai Movie TM.
Look, guys, I know that this is a remake of a 1960ies samurai film which is apparently as well loved as everyhing Akira Kurosawa ever did and according to this interview , Miike said this about the remake:
I cannot thank him enough for not including a love story.
BUT EVERY SINGLE OTHER THING HE SAYS IN THIS INTERVIEW IS JUST FUCKING INSANE.
OF COURSE YOU DON'T NEED TO SUPER IMPOSE A MODERN MINDSET OVER THE SAMURAI STORY.
BUT ALSO MAYBE DON'T HAVE WOMEN RAPED???
AND ALSO MAYBE TRY TO MAKE THE AUDIENCE CARE ABOUT THE OTHER TWELVE ASSASSINS WHILE YOU ARE MAKING A MOVIE ABOUT THEM???
Jesus Christ, I am so angry.
The movie spents at least thirty minutes on showing us just how fucking evil the shogun's brother is and frankly, I could have done with five minutes of that and with a lot more interaction between the characters.
As Miike is apparently in love with Yamada Takayuki (same, bro, honestly), he gets the second protagonist role: He is Shimada's nephew, a gambler and womanizer who thinks life as a samurai is not for him and only joins his uncle in his weird assassination scheme because the director knew I was going to watch this movie and needed something to keep me interested because he sure as hell did not pay any attention to the other dudes.
AND THERE IS SO MUCH POTENTIAL THERE!!! One of the thirteen assassins is a ronin (unemployed samurai) who trained under Shimada and returns to him for this mission, with his super adorable very young student in tow and I WOULD HAVE LOVED SOME INTERACTION BETWEEN THEM OH MY GOD???
The student iS SO ADORABLE AND TRIES SO HARD NOT TO PANIC WHEN HE HAS TO KILL HIS FIRST DUDE AND TRIES TO MAKE HIS MASTER PROUD BUT we only get to see the tiniest glimpses of this (and most of his 3-minutes-of-screentime-interaction happens with Yamada's character ... which is nice for me personally but is objectively a bad decision for making an engaging movie with different characters) This in turn leads to EVERY. SINGLE. DEATH. in this movie having the same emotional impact as losing a game of Worms.
Baby samurai having feels. Not likely to be pictured any time soon: said feels.
Honestly. I was so ready to get invested in this and they gave me exactly zero to work with. One of the assassins is played by the actor of Izaki from "Crows Zero" and was therefore my darling and the only time I got some sort of interaction with the others from him, was A SECOND BEFORE HE DIED (he smiled rather sadly at his hurt friend before he was stabbed because HE WAS STANDING IN FRONT OF A PAPER DOOR. SKFJHJKSHDFDS).
THIS IS ALL I GOT!!! I WANTED MORE!!!?!??!! ARGHSHS. (okay yes yes there was a scene with him and his friend before that it was a single one and lasted for about five seconds!!!)
To give credit where credit is due there is one engaging relationship in this film and that's the sad forced rivalry between Shimada and the evil Lord's servant, Hanbei, who is Shimada's childhood/samurai-high-school friend.
Hanbei sees the evil in his lord as well as everyone else but he keeps clinging to the belief - that the evil lord installed in him - that a samurai has to serve his master no matter what.
He asks Shimada to not kill his lord to which Shimada basically answers "dude. he eats people" and Hanbei is SO CONFLICTED because he has this rivalry with Shimada going on and Shimada just wants to be chill friends with him. ;__;
Naturally, that ends with Hanbei dead and Shimada a bit sad. Naww.This is by far the best character development this movie gives us and I don't even know what to say anymore.
THERE ARE 13 TITULAR CHARACTERS IN THIS FILM AND ONLY ONE OF THEM HAS SORT OF AN UNDERSTANDABLE MOTIVATION. Some of the assassins are even the servants of the others so they have no say in whether they even want to partake in this endeavour and guess what THEY REALLY DON'T GET A SAY, NOT EVEN A SINGLE LINE OF DIALOGUE FOR SOME OF THEM.
AMAZING :))) WHY DID THEY FUCK THIS UP.
Man, this film is a choppy mess. We spend half an hour on establishing that the evil sadistic lord is really evil and sadistic right from the start and at least twenty minutes of this are entirely wasted. For example, the movie begins with a high standing politician inviting Shimada into his house to motivate him to take a stand against the evil Lord and as the politician apparently does not trust in his ability to TALK a person into doing his bidding, he parades around a horribly abused woman who suffered greatly under the evil Lord until Shimada agrees to murder him. This would have been fine as Shimada's motivation but we also get to see him talking to a different dude who lost his son and daughter-in-law to the lord's sadistic schemes (including horrible flashbacks) AND THEN WE ARE SUBJECTED TO ANOTHER SCENE OF THE LORD KILLING A SMALL BOY AND HIS FAMILY WITH ARROWS.
If you tell me a dude in a movie rapes women and kills babies I can believe that and I do not need to see this SPECIAL KIND OF RAPEY EVIL, thank you very much (we do not see this rape scene, it is alluded to only, as is the killing of the child. Small... favours I'm guessing?), but Miike sure loves his horror films and cranks the aesthetics up to mach five when he presents the woman without feet and arms crying blood and writhing naked on the floor. I am very disgusted by this scene and it squicks me out but I can understand the uh.. visual appeal as he frames her as a monster/demon which ties in to a later part of the movie but yeah one well executed scene a good movie does not make.
All in all I was extremly disappointed by this film although I spent the last thirty minutes screaming at it (BECAUSE I WAS REALLY HOPING FOR AT LEAST SOME OF THE PEOPLE TO SURVIVE AND GET SOME SORT OF... STORY ARC?? THAT WAS PROBABLY RATHER NAIVE OF ME), but then I came across the deleted scenes which left me not only disappointed but downright FURIOS WITH WHITE HOT RAGE.
As it turns out the international version of this film is missing 17 minutes of scenes and... some of these decisions... are just mind boggling.
The biggest chunk of scenes who never saw the light of day in Not-Japan-istan concern a character called Koyata who is implied to be a supernatural being (a spirit/demon/what-have-you).
And by imply I mean that we see him getting stabbed through the neck with a sword and right at the end of the movie he runs around again and has a nice chat with the last man standing before he runs off to God knows where. There are no other hints, this comes right out of fucking nowhere and hits the viewer, who just had to witness the death of everyone we got to know over the course of the movie, square in the head, mere seconds before the credits roll.
I have a hard time explaining this. It's insane on so many levels, so bear with me for a while as cutting Koyata's scenes was the best and worst decision they could make.
There are two scenes which prove Kotaya's demonic powers and I will begin with the less terrible one.
So in the international version, Shimada's little gang meets Koyata in a forest where he is literally hanging around in a cage. He tells them that he desires Upashi, the wife of his master, and was therefore banned to the woods.
Everybody nods, Koyata shows them the way through the woods and then he is part of their gang. Just... like that. They spend half a line on him not being a samurai and that's it for his character development.
In the original version there is a scene right before he leads them on the right path where he asks Shimada to take him with them and since he is rather pushy and they are in a hurry, one of the assassins tries to knock him out with a heavy branch but Koyata just shrugs the hit off as he is tooootally overpowered~. They don't question it that much, which is fine because at this point Koyata is much needed comic relief in an all together too serious movie, so I am honestly wondering why they didn't keep this one scene in to give the movie at least some sort of a likeable character.
This decision is even more confusing when you consider that they kept the following scene in:
I AM SERIOUSLY TRIGGER WARNING HERE FOR BODY HORROR!!!
In the international version, after Koyata joined our merry gang of bland samurai people, we see him thinking about Upashi, aka we are privy to a flashback where a woman clad in rags sitting with her legs spread near a river is eating something red and slimey what comes from between her legs.
So yeah. We have a demon woman eating her fetus which definitely tells us that Koyata is either a demon himself or in love with a demon and honestly??? This shot of Upashi could have happily been left on the cutting room floor as it is SO UTTERLY CONFUSING!!! I am not very well versed in Japanese folklore and had to google to get what the fuck they were going for here. Why was this allowed to stay but not the relatively harmless scene of the assassins banging Koyata on the head and him not reacting???
IS THIS SERIOUSLY HOW FAR HETERONORMATIVITY HAS TAKEN US???
At this point, I was merely confused at their weird ass cutting decisions but then the next scene came and... there are no words... so take this excerpt from another website.
I AM SERIOUSLY TRIGGER WARNING HERE FOR RAPE!!!
from here. BE CAREFUL THERE ARE PICTURES, NOTHING TOO TERRIBLE BUT STILL
They are describing this... mildly. It was a rape scene. We are subjected to a rape scene with one of the "good guys" we are supposed to root for.
I cannot deal. Seriously. I thought this movie was messy because of wild, brainless editing BUT NO, TURNS OUT THEY ACTUALLY TRIED TO SALVAGE THIS MOVIE AND SPARE US ALL THE UGLY RAPE SCENES BECAUSE THIS MOVIE IS A PIECE OF SHIT AND I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO SLAP THE DIRECTOR AND ASK HIM WHAT THE FUCK HE WAS THINKING.
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MESSY THING. ARGHSKDFHJSD.
I WANTED TO ROOT FOR THIS.
OH MY GOD.
In case it wasn't obvious I am definitely not recommending this movie: the international version is bland and boring and full of confusing cuts and the original version is a disastrous terrible piece of shit movie which should come with trigger warnings. For fucks sake.
I need to watch Crows Zero and then I need to set fire to the dvd of 13 Assassins.
This was an incredibly messy review, and I apologize but I needed to get this out of my system. HMPFH.
Me: Hey I really miss Yamada Takayuki's face how about I watch a movie with him?
Brain: Yeah, how about 13 Assassins where he has all of ten minutes of screentime?
Me:....
Brain: 8D
Me: Alright fine!
So 13 Assassins is a film by Takashi Miike (of "Crows Zero" fame and infamous for my personal experience with "Terraformars"). It's about 13 dudes needing to assassinate a badshit insane evil sadistic guy and... that's... basically it.
SPOILER ALERT FOR "13 ASSASSINS". NO SERIOUSLY I MEAN IT I WILL SPOILER THE ENTIRE FILM.
I had to google all of the protagonists' names again because THERE ARE SO MANY OLD JAPANESE DUDES WITH A BAD HAIRCUT IN THIS MOVIE IT'S KINDA HARD TO KEEP TRACK OF ALL OF THEM.
Okay, so our main evil dude is Lord Naritsugu who is the shogun's half brother and can therefore happily torture, kill, maim and rape his subjects without being held accountable for it. He is about to be granted even greater political power and nobody wants that, so people ask old, honorable samurai Shimada Shinzaemon - our protagonist - to kill the dude.
Instead of Shimada just slipping him some poison and get done with it, he instead finds himself eleven people and cobbles together the most convoluted bullshit execution plan ever, where he will buy an entire mountain village, lure the evil lord there and then fight him with a dozen men. It also involves burning cows and this could have been engaging - if maybe this was a comedy and not a Serious Samurai Movie TM.
Look, guys, I know that this is a remake of a 1960ies samurai film which is apparently as well loved as everyhing Akira Kurosawa ever did and according to this interview , Miike said this about the remake:
I cannot thank him enough for not including a love story.
BUT EVERY SINGLE OTHER THING HE SAYS IN THIS INTERVIEW IS JUST FUCKING INSANE.
OF COURSE YOU DON'T NEED TO SUPER IMPOSE A MODERN MINDSET OVER THE SAMURAI STORY.
BUT ALSO MAYBE DON'T HAVE WOMEN RAPED???
AND ALSO MAYBE TRY TO MAKE THE AUDIENCE CARE ABOUT THE OTHER TWELVE ASSASSINS WHILE YOU ARE MAKING A MOVIE ABOUT THEM???
Jesus Christ, I am so angry.
The movie spents at least thirty minutes on showing us just how fucking evil the shogun's brother is and frankly, I could have done with five minutes of that and with a lot more interaction between the characters.
As Miike is apparently in love with Yamada Takayuki (same, bro, honestly), he gets the second protagonist role: He is Shimada's nephew, a gambler and womanizer who thinks life as a samurai is not for him and only joins his uncle in his weird assassination scheme because the director knew I was going to watch this movie and needed something to keep me interested because he sure as hell did not pay any attention to the other dudes.
AND THERE IS SO MUCH POTENTIAL THERE!!! One of the thirteen assassins is a ronin (unemployed samurai) who trained under Shimada and returns to him for this mission, with his super adorable very young student in tow and I WOULD HAVE LOVED SOME INTERACTION BETWEEN THEM OH MY GOD???
The student iS SO ADORABLE AND TRIES SO HARD NOT TO PANIC WHEN HE HAS TO KILL HIS FIRST DUDE AND TRIES TO MAKE HIS MASTER PROUD BUT we only get to see the tiniest glimpses of this (and most of his 3-minutes-of-screentime-interaction happens with Yamada's character ... which is nice for me personally but is objectively a bad decision for making an engaging movie with different characters) This in turn leads to EVERY. SINGLE. DEATH. in this movie having the same emotional impact as losing a game of Worms.
Baby samurai having feels. Not likely to be pictured any time soon: said feels.
Honestly. I was so ready to get invested in this and they gave me exactly zero to work with. One of the assassins is played by the actor of Izaki from "Crows Zero" and was therefore my darling and the only time I got some sort of interaction with the others from him, was A SECOND BEFORE HE DIED (he smiled rather sadly at his hurt friend before he was stabbed because HE WAS STANDING IN FRONT OF A PAPER DOOR. SKFJHJKSHDFDS).
THIS IS ALL I GOT!!! I WANTED MORE!!!?!??!! ARGHSHS. (okay yes yes there was a scene with him and his friend before that it was a single one and lasted for about five seconds!!!)
To give credit where credit is due there is one engaging relationship in this film and that's the sad forced rivalry between Shimada and the evil Lord's servant, Hanbei, who is Shimada's childhood/samurai-high-school friend.
Hanbei sees the evil in his lord as well as everyone else but he keeps clinging to the belief - that the evil lord installed in him - that a samurai has to serve his master no matter what.
He asks Shimada to not kill his lord to which Shimada basically answers "dude. he eats people" and Hanbei is SO CONFLICTED because he has this rivalry with Shimada going on and Shimada just wants to be chill friends with him. ;__;
Naturally, that ends with Hanbei dead and Shimada a bit sad. Naww.This is by far the best character development this movie gives us and I don't even know what to say anymore.
THERE ARE 13 TITULAR CHARACTERS IN THIS FILM AND ONLY ONE OF THEM HAS SORT OF AN UNDERSTANDABLE MOTIVATION. Some of the assassins are even the servants of the others so they have no say in whether they even want to partake in this endeavour and guess what THEY REALLY DON'T GET A SAY, NOT EVEN A SINGLE LINE OF DIALOGUE FOR SOME OF THEM.
AMAZING :))) WHY DID THEY FUCK THIS UP.
Man, this film is a choppy mess. We spend half an hour on establishing that the evil sadistic lord is really evil and sadistic right from the start and at least twenty minutes of this are entirely wasted. For example, the movie begins with a high standing politician inviting Shimada into his house to motivate him to take a stand against the evil Lord and as the politician apparently does not trust in his ability to TALK a person into doing his bidding, he parades around a horribly abused woman who suffered greatly under the evil Lord until Shimada agrees to murder him. This would have been fine as Shimada's motivation but we also get to see him talking to a different dude who lost his son and daughter-in-law to the lord's sadistic schemes (including horrible flashbacks) AND THEN WE ARE SUBJECTED TO ANOTHER SCENE OF THE LORD KILLING A SMALL BOY AND HIS FAMILY WITH ARROWS.
If you tell me a dude in a movie rapes women and kills babies I can believe that and I do not need to see this SPECIAL KIND OF RAPEY EVIL, thank you very much (we do not see this rape scene, it is alluded to only, as is the killing of the child. Small... favours I'm guessing?), but Miike sure loves his horror films and cranks the aesthetics up to mach five when he presents the woman without feet and arms crying blood and writhing naked on the floor. I am very disgusted by this scene and it squicks me out but I can understand the uh.. visual appeal as he frames her as a monster/demon which ties in to a later part of the movie but yeah one well executed scene a good movie does not make.
All in all I was extremly disappointed by this film although I spent the last thirty minutes screaming at it (BECAUSE I WAS REALLY HOPING FOR AT LEAST SOME OF THE PEOPLE TO SURVIVE AND GET SOME SORT OF... STORY ARC?? THAT WAS PROBABLY RATHER NAIVE OF ME), but then I came across the deleted scenes which left me not only disappointed but downright FURIOS WITH WHITE HOT RAGE.
As it turns out the international version of this film is missing 17 minutes of scenes and... some of these decisions... are just mind boggling.
The biggest chunk of scenes who never saw the light of day in Not-Japan-istan concern a character called Koyata who is implied to be a supernatural being (a spirit/demon/what-have-you).
And by imply I mean that we see him getting stabbed through the neck with a sword and right at the end of the movie he runs around again and has a nice chat with the last man standing before he runs off to God knows where. There are no other hints, this comes right out of fucking nowhere and hits the viewer, who just had to witness the death of everyone we got to know over the course of the movie, square in the head, mere seconds before the credits roll.
I have a hard time explaining this. It's insane on so many levels, so bear with me for a while as cutting Koyata's scenes was the best and worst decision they could make.
There are two scenes which prove Kotaya's demonic powers and I will begin with the less terrible one.
So in the international version, Shimada's little gang meets Koyata in a forest where he is literally hanging around in a cage. He tells them that he desires Upashi, the wife of his master, and was therefore banned to the woods.
Everybody nods, Koyata shows them the way through the woods and then he is part of their gang. Just... like that. They spend half a line on him not being a samurai and that's it for his character development.
In the original version there is a scene right before he leads them on the right path where he asks Shimada to take him with them and since he is rather pushy and they are in a hurry, one of the assassins tries to knock him out with a heavy branch but Koyata just shrugs the hit off as he is tooootally overpowered~. They don't question it that much, which is fine because at this point Koyata is much needed comic relief in an all together too serious movie, so I am honestly wondering why they didn't keep this one scene in to give the movie at least some sort of a likeable character.
This decision is even more confusing when you consider that they kept the following scene in:
I AM SERIOUSLY TRIGGER WARNING HERE FOR BODY HORROR!!!
In the international version, after Koyata joined our merry gang of bland samurai people, we see him thinking about Upashi, aka we are privy to a flashback where a woman clad in rags sitting with her legs spread near a river is eating something red and slimey what comes from between her legs.
So yeah. We have a demon woman eating her fetus which definitely tells us that Koyata is either a demon himself or in love with a demon and honestly??? This shot of Upashi could have happily been left on the cutting room floor as it is SO UTTERLY CONFUSING!!! I am not very well versed in Japanese folklore and had to google to get what the fuck they were going for here. Why was this allowed to stay but not the relatively harmless scene of the assassins banging Koyata on the head and him not reacting???
IS THIS SERIOUSLY HOW FAR HETERONORMATIVITY HAS TAKEN US???
At this point, I was merely confused at their weird ass cutting decisions but then the next scene came and... there are no words... so take this excerpt from another website.
I AM SERIOUSLY TRIGGER WARNING HERE FOR RAPE!!!
from here. BE CAREFUL THERE ARE PICTURES, NOTHING TOO TERRIBLE BUT STILL
They are describing this... mildly. It was a rape scene. We are subjected to a rape scene with one of the "good guys" we are supposed to root for.
I cannot deal. Seriously. I thought this movie was messy because of wild, brainless editing BUT NO, TURNS OUT THEY ACTUALLY TRIED TO SALVAGE THIS MOVIE AND SPARE US ALL THE UGLY RAPE SCENES BECAUSE THIS MOVIE IS A PIECE OF SHIT AND I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO SLAP THE DIRECTOR AND ASK HIM WHAT THE FUCK HE WAS THINKING.
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MESSY THING. ARGHSKDFHJSD.
I WANTED TO ROOT FOR THIS.
OH MY GOD.
In case it wasn't obvious I am definitely not recommending this movie: the international version is bland and boring and full of confusing cuts and the original version is a disastrous terrible piece of shit movie which should come with trigger warnings. For fucks sake.
I need to watch Crows Zero and then I need to set fire to the dvd of 13 Assassins.
This was an incredibly messy review, and I apologize but I needed to get this out of my system. HMPFH.