13 Assassins offers a nearly perfect kick-off for the summer film season, an action-packed film capped by a 45+ minute battle scene but held together by big-picture questions of masculine identity, loyalty, and a life well-led.
Takashi Miike frequently shoots on miniscule budgets by American standards, his films scattering across the art-house continuum. Often pegged as a genre filmmaker, his American fame begins with hyper-violent films like Ichi the Killer and Audition (these two, though both shockingly vicious, are starkly different in their use of violence, their storyline, pace, and style) and hyper-prolific output (sometimes directing 5 or 7 films in a single year).
13 Assassins is set in 1844 Japan, a time of peace but one marked by corrupt feudal system represented here by Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira (Gorô Inagaki), sadistic in his uncaring abuse of position, yet commanding loyalty from his samurai and army. Convinced that Naritsugu’s reign must be stopped, Shinzaemon Shimada (Kôji Yakusho) gathers a small band of samurai and ronin willing to face certain but noble death.
Much of the first half of the film evades fast-paced violence some may expect of Miike, as he concentrates on questions of why men fight, how a fighter lives during peace, what makes a noble life and death. This slower-paced, more thoughtful Miike shows his willingness to explore some motivations that lie behind his films’ most violent impulses. Shinzaemon, recruited to lead the group, admits his hands shake from excitement at the prospect of battle, living and dying as a samurai should but is denied during a time of peace. How does his excitement differ from Naritsugu’s when confronted with a new victim? Questions of honor, of power, of justice within and through violence are explored throughout.
As the plan is laid, Shinzaemon untrains the men’s samurai code “No mercy! There is no samurai code or fair play in battle! No sword? Use a stick. No stick? Use a rock. No rock? Use your fists and feet. Lose your life, but make the enemy pay!” It’s a tricky line, not altogether clear, between fighting and dying by the samurai code and that code’s complete uselessness in the increasingly modern world. (While Naritsugu’s lapdog Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura) reminds Shinzaemon that a samurai must do everything to save his master, Shinzaemon counters with a mission to “do what must be done for the people”).
Buying out a village and laying a complex ambush, the assassins (now 13) jump into action, fighting not the expected 70 soldiers but the 200 that descend on the village. Once the carnage begins, the pace seldom slows for the next 45 minutes. The battle is without aerial tricks or kinetic swordplay (okay, there is a scene featuring bulls, backs aflame, charging through narrow passages), concentrating on aggressive, dirty, and relentless fighting (and a little well-placed use of explosives).
Most entertaining is Koyata (Yûsuke Iseya), a common bandit who is the thirteenth of the assassins. A figure of fun and sport, his is the voice of impending modernity, mocking the samurai’s arrogance by outliving them all: “I thought samurai would be fun, but you bore me. You’re useless. Even more useless in great numbers.”
The playing field gradually levels, pared down in the final swordfight to Naritsugu and Shinzaemon. The former dies afraid, without honor, unbelieving that his position cannot confer immortality along with its seeming omnipotence, the latter accepts his death honorably, dying noble as a true samurai (while we’re simultaneously being reminded that such a thing no longer exists, if it ever did outside of the filmic construct).
13 Assassins asks us to reconsider its genre and its icon, the samurai, all the while reiterating rather than upending its dominant motifs (perhaps comparable to Clint Eastwood’s treatment of the Western and the cowboy in Unforgiven). As such, it rises above the mindless summer action flick, carefully layering historical accuracy (costumes are stunning throughout as are sets) with modern questions of meaning and identity, and postmodern collision of sensibilities.
