47 Ronin sucks, but you knew that already

 

Featuring heavily in the posters and promotional materials for 47 Ronin is a picture of a shirtless, bald man covered head to toe in tattoos of his skeleton and organs, holding a flintlock pistol. Considering how much attention is shown on him in some of these posters you’d assume he’d be an important character, maybe a villain. You’d be wrong. He’s in the film for 15 seconds, has a single line of dialogue and takes part in no action, and is never seen again. He doesn’t even have a pistol on him. He’s not even a minor character, he’s a background one, an extra, and yet they shoved him prominently on the poster to the point where he overshadows the rest of the cast, who are actually in the movie. This is an odd, confusing move. I’m guessing the marketing team thought that the image of a man with his skeleton and organs tattooed over his entire body would be interesting and draw people’s interest. They certainly needed something to draw people’s interest, because interesting is not a word I’d use to describe 47 Ronin.

47 Ronin is a bad movie, and the worst kind of bad – it’s not entertaining in the least. There’s no real fun to be had here, you just slog through a movie that takes something that should be a fun romp and balloons it into a plodding mess where there’s no joy to be had. It's not even so-bad-its-good, it's just bad bad. It’s that painful, boring, disappointing kind of bad movie where you spend most of its length waiting for it to get good, only to realise that two hours have passed, the film has ended and you’ve wasted your money on it. That’s how bad 47 Ronin is.

The film has a major identity crisis. It takes influence from a true story, as well as the various Japanese samurai films based on the story, but then throws in a supernatural element that doesn’t mesh with the story’s themes of honour and sacrifice. It takes the serious tone of dramatic Samurai movies and then tries to shoehorn it into an American action movie, a mixture that just doesn’t work. It’s never fun and the movie takes itself way too seriously.

On the one hand it wants to be a serious Samurai drama. A lot of time is given to explaining and delving into the convoluted and complicated politics of feudal Japan, taking a look at the intricacies of its system of honour and duty. On the other hand this is a movie with monsters, ogres, demonic monks and a dragon, where witchcraft features heavily into the plot.

So what’s it about exactly?

In feudal Japan, the land is divided into various provinces which pay tribute to the Shogun, the ultimate ruler of the fractured country. The ruler of the Oki province, Lord Asano, takes in a white ‘half-breed’ boy, rumoured to have been raised by demons. The boy, named Kai, grows up hated by the samurai of Oki, including Asano’s son Oishi. However Asano’s daughter, Mika, takes a liking to Kai and the two form a bond.

Years later, Oki hosts a visit from the Shogun and various feudal lords. The ambitious, obviously evil Lord Kira wants to claim Oki for his own, and conspires with a witch, Mizuki, to curse Asano, causing him to shame himself in front of the Shogun. This leads to him committing seppuku, ritualistic suicide, to regain his honour. With Asano dead, the Shogun banishes the samurai of Oki and orders them to not take revenge, and also arranges for Mika and Kira to marry in one year, after which time Kira will gain control Oki. Oishi is imprisoned in a pit, Kai is sold into slavery, the rest of the Samurai disband and Maki is taken to Kira’s spooky mountain fortress.

A year later, Oishi and the surviving Ronin (dishonoured Samurai without masters), including Kai, band together to get revenge on Kira, rescue Mika and avenge their master. What I’ve described here is over half of the film. This movie plods along at a snail’s pace, taking way too long to get to the point, and at two hours in length it’s an ordeal. It’s often aimless, and badly edited so things seem to move forward abruptly and jarringly. Another issue is the way it handles its characters – it takes a long time to really get a feel of who people are, and the lack of development or personality in most of them means you won’t care either way. Coming as a surprise, I’d argue that Keanu’s Kai isn’t the main character, with Oishi largely filling that role. Oishi is the one who leads the ronin, bands them together, goes through some character development and remains the focal point of the movie. Kai, on the other hand, is just there for the American audiences – the white outcast who can swing a sword around and be the main love interest in a tale that, thematically, has no use for a romance subplot.

Frustratingly, the film, with the obvious exception of Keanu Reeves, is filled with talented Japanese actors and actresses, and yet squanders their use completely. People like Tadanobu Asano, Rinko Kikuchi and Hiroyuki Sanada (who are excellent in Ichi the Killer, Babel and Sunshine respectively) are given nothing to work with, and don’t do much. While Sanada does what he can with the gruff Oishi, Asano is given nothing to do but sit around looking untrustworthy as Kira. Rinko Kikuchi is the only one having any fun as the over-the-top-to-the-point-of-being-silly witch Mizuki, slinking around and whispering a lot. Keanu Reeves doesn’t even bother trying to act, but with material like this can you blame him?  

The cinematography is odd, as often the film can look nice, with the costume and set design generally complicated with CG background details. At other times the lighting is off or scenes look bland. The music and sound effects are weak, with vaguely traditionally sounding tunes that seem like tracks dropped from The Last Samurai filling in most of the scenes, while many of the sound effects sound off or weak, or simply missing (disembowelment should sound meaty and gross, like in 13 Assassins, but I guess as a M15+ movie they didn’t want to risk it).

So don’t see 47 Ronin. It’s simply not worth it. There’s no joy to be had. If you wanted to see a good, dramatic, traditional Samurai flick, check out 13 Assassins by Takashi Miike. It’s a slow, methodical Samurai drama that builds up to an epic finale. If you just wanted some Americanised ‘safe’ action flick with a Japanese taste, go for The Last Samurai, with pre-craziness Tom Cruise. Both are far better ways to spend your time than 47 Ronin.