TheRetroCritic

Back in 2003, Tom Cruise starred in Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai , a film chronicling the fall of the samurai at the hands of a tactical collaboration between an increasingly modern Japanese government, its Emperor and the US. If you can get past the idea of Tom Cruise as a samurai and the fact that this is basically Dances With Wolves in a different setting, then The Last Samurai is actually a very good film. Cruise plays disillusioned, alcoholic former US Army Captain Nathan Algren, who is haunted by the memories of massacres involving Native American civilians, as he is hired to help train the Japanese army. He reluctantly agrees to travel to Japan and teach the Japanese soldiers how to use modern weaponry but he is captured after an impromptu battle against the samurai and is brought back to a village where he gets to know Ken Watanabe's Lord Mastumoto, the leader of the samurai rebellion, and learns the ways of the samurai. Realising how much of an underdog the sa

That Hiroyuki Sanada has been wasting his time lately with underwhelming Hollywood blockbusters like The Wolverine and 47 Ronin is criminal, especially when you know he can be as good as he is in 2002's The Twilight Samurai . Now, don't get excited, no vampire samurais here. No, this is a proper samurai flick in which we follow Sanada's low-level samurai Iguchi as he goes home every evening to be with his daughters and his sick mother following the untimely death of his wife. The people around him mock him, nicknaming him "Twilight Seibei", he even gets in trouble for not taking care of himself, his clothing and his appearance enough, yet he isn't miserable: he enjoys seeing his daughter grow up day by day and he has very little ambition besides giving up being a samurai eventually and living a peaceful life as a farmer. The film is set at a time when the Japanese feudal system was transitioning to a more modern one and the old samurai ways were start

Some movie concepts are just too good to pass up. Nicolas Cage as a weatherman, John Travolta as an overweight woman, Keanu Reeves as a samurai... Thank goodness for 47 Ronin for suggesting the latter! Unfortunately, the film ended up costing nearly $200M and it's looking like 10 people went to actually see it, and that's including me. Problems between the studio and the director causing the budget to inflate ridiculously due to endless reshoots and stuff like that. Unlike flops like, say, John Carter or The Lone Ranger , you really can't tell where the money went with 47 Ronin, a film which looks like a $10M flick with some decent effects and some really awful ones not exactly helping justify the huge budget. The film doesn't look that great and is more akin to a B-movie like Season Of The Witch visually, which is not a good thing. Another issue is the ridiculous marketing which accompanied this movie: Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays the real main character in t

Ah Kill Bill, I remember seeing Quentin Tarantino's 4th film at the cinema and having THE best time. This was like watching a compilation of badass revenge movies from the 70's all put together into a fresh, new, exciting, unique package. I hadn't seen anything quite like it and it blew me away. Uma Thurman gives a career-best performance as The Bride, a woman betrayed by her own buddies, namely the "Deadly Viper Assassination Squad" and its leader only known to us as "Bill", and left for dead. But a gunshot to the head just wasn't enough to keep her down and super-Uma is soon back and ready to kick ass. We follow her journey from when she wakes up from a long coma to her confrontation with Lucy Liu's O-Ren Ishii. It's typical revenge movie stuff and it all builds up to a thrilling final fight where the as-yet-unnamed Bride takes on The Crazy 88, easily one of the most useless gangs in movie history. By the end you're so into the Luc

The prospect of bonkers director Takashi Miike directing a Seven Samurai -style samurai flick seemed like one awesome idea. Like Tarantino making a gratuitous war comedy/thriller or Takeshi Kitano taking on the blind swordsman himself! So has Akira Kurosawa been bettered? Not quite, but 13 Assassins is certainly right up there! In the first half of the film, Miike takes the time to introduce Goro Inagaki's antagonist: a guy pretty much as delightfully evil as it gets. A mad, cruel, heartless serial killer, you can't wait for Koji Yakusho's assassins to get rid of him. The titular assassins are introduced one after the other brilliantly in the fashion of the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven: it's a classic build-up complete with montage, emotional conflicts and power speeches! Then, in the second half of the film, the assassins' plan goes into practice and soon enough they take over a village where the main battle takes place. Without spoiling it, let me ju