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The Last Samurai review
:. Director: Edward Zwick
:. Starring: Tom Cruise, Ken Watanabe
:. Running Time: 2:24
:. Year: 2003
:. Country: USA
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With his long hair, his beard, and his traumatic flashbacks of an Indian massacre, Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise), an alcoholic and cynical cavalry officer who sold out to Corporate America (the Winchester Company), is the Ugly American par excellence. It's been a while since we've seen such a nihilistic piece of a blockbuster. Without going as far back as two highly confrontational westerns such as Little Big Man and Soldier Blue, Dances with Wolves certainly comes to mind. But Costner's film was overshadowed by its self-serving purpose, the somewhat over-rated film—Open Range is a better achievement of a western—often coming out as a celebration of himself as an actor/director. Here, for the first time of his career, we get the feeling that Tom Cruise is serving a movie he's in and not vice versa. Even in Born on the Fourth of July, he was a hero and victim. Here, he is a soulless killer, an arrogant imperialist whose beauty is cold, neutralized by his vanity. During the course of the film, the glorious modern warrior will be humiliated many times and through him, Cruise finally scratches his golden boy image.
The Last Samurai is old style Hollywood, bringing us back to the 60's, when action films could have panache and a soul, even if their melodramatic tones would make you smile. While director Edward Zwick has an undeniable great visual style, his vision has always been embarrassed by a taste for soapy characters' interactions (see Legends of the Fall). This is a mainstream film aimed at moving you and making you cry, trying to be cute too many times, but if you're ready to accept the Hollywood rules of the film—and you probably must be since you went to see a Tom Cruise film—it works. The Last Samurai is a flawed story of redemption and cultural adaptation but a great action film. From the beginning with its ghost-like apparition of the samurais which serves to build the myth and is reminiscent of John Mc Tiernan's Thirteenth Warrior, to the final heroic sequence, the film shows a sense of violence and glory we haven't seen since Braveheart. The battle scenes are sharp and grandiose at the same time, plunging us into the center of the field, with an adrenaline rush, or panning wide slowly to create lyricism. Incidentally, just like Terminator 3 and The Matrix Reloaded, this is an action film that shows a war between tradition and modernity and sees evolution as puppet of greed. With The Last Samurai, Edward Zwick may have unexpectedly become a great action director. This is particularly evident during the ninja attack of the village, which brings a vivid sense of urgency that recalls Christian Slater's death sequence in John Woo's underrated Windtalkers.
Obviously, The Last Samurai isn't a very innovative work. Richard Chamberlain went through a similar—if not as bloody—journey in Shogun and Zwick pays homage to the masters of Samurai films. Any ignoramus whose "in-depth" foreign film culture has been achieved through watching the couple of foreign film available at the local video store will complain that it isn't a Kurosawa film (check out the Orange County Register's calendar section to learn how to pretend to be knowledgeable in foreign cinema by quoting films or directors that usually have nothing to do with the film you're reviewing) but Zwick never tries to fool us. This is a respectful homage of a man who loves old samurai films and an academic way to introduce them to the mainstream audience, kind of what Tarantino did in Kill Bill with an edge.
The homage is served through gorgeous cinematography, attention to historical details and the implication of its actors. Cruise might be out of place a couple of times—his drunken laugh at the beginning and his screams of pain at night—but his acting is sober and complements Ken Watanabe's menacing aura as Katsumoto—the samurai from the film's title. Cruise's presence is felt but discreet as he knows he's not truly the center here, but just a vehicle bringing the audience into this world and period—and the film certainly succeeds at this level.
Fred Thom
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