“The Last Samurai” tries to incorporate elements of the work of Akira Kurosawa and the Oscar-winning “Dances With Wolves”, but ends up, essentially, with an entertaining but wrongheaded Tom Cruise vehicle. It drives to imitate a theme Kurosawa invented and perfected - the eastern western. In the end, “Last Samurai” collapses under the weight of its big-budgeted, politically correct ambitions.

Compare this to Kurosawa’s classic “Seven Samurai”, with its all-Japanese cast and the more fluid, almost poetic movements of its action sequences. The Japanese actors in “Last Samurai” perform magnificently in the battle scenes (as well as in quieter moments), but the combat, as shot by director Edward Zwick, seems stilted by contrast – an Americanized Samurai battle scene. It’s thrilling to watch, but sort of underwhelming at the same time; we’ve seen it all before in “Braveheart” and “Gladiator”.

Sporting the very Caucasian Cruise as its star, it also attempts to be “Dances With Wolves” in Japan – placing a 19th century ex-soldier within the living space of his presumed enemy, where he inevitably forms a bond with the red/yellow natives, fights alongside them, becomes one of them and, for good measure, falls in love with the local widow.

The difference is that Kevin Costner directed himself in that picture with at least a modicum of restraint, allowing the action to flow naturally, and without interrupting the battle every ten seconds to pose for a slow-motion close-up of his pretty face, as Cruise does here.

Cruise (who in the last few years seems to have grown more in love with the sound of his own voice) plays Captain Nathan Algren, a Union boy who earned the Medal of Honor at Gettysburg, but then fell into depression, alcoholism and self-loathing after taking part in a massacre of innocent Indians (which we see in a flashback, shot with TV movie – level clumsiness). Now reduced to hawking Winchester rifles at cheap gun shows, he’s offered a chance to train Japan’s new, modernizing army by his old superior, Colonel Bagley (played by Tony Goldwyn, who you always figure for the villain in every movie he’s in, and you’re right), the same commanding officer who ordered the aforementioned massacre. Algren is offered $500 a month for his services (no doubt a princely sum in 1876). Just to give you a hint of what will happen at the movie’s climax, Algren tells Bagley, “For $500 a month, I’ll kill whoever you want me to kill….but I’ll gladly kill you for nothing.”

Once in Japan, Algren finds the fresh troops woefully unprepared for battle; worse still, their Japanese commanders want to take them immediately into combat against the Samurai, the old-style warriors who have ruled Japan for 500 years and are the only ones standing in the way of their country’s full entrance into modernity. In the first major fight, the green soldiers are slaughtered by the sword-toting Samurai, as Algren predicted. Algren himself is nearly killed, but in the nick of time is spared by Katsumoto (Ken Wanatabe), the Samurai leader. Katsumoto apparently saw Algren in some mystical dream at the movie’s beginning, and believes he can learn something from the American. Severely wounded, Algren is taken back to the Samurai village, where he is set up in the house of Taka (Koyuki, an unutterably beautiful Japanese actress making her American debut), the local widow. She is charged with the task of nursing him back to health. Oh, and just FYI: She’s a widow because Algren killed her husband during the melee.

From here, the movie follows “Dances With Wolves” so closely that Kevin Costner might have grounds for legal action: Algren spends a few months gradually warming up to his captors, learning their language, helping them repel a vicious ninja attack (yes, ninjas) and falling in love with the widow he made (who wouldn’t?). Cruise, of course, takes center stage during the climactic battle against the Japanese Army, which is pretty much required by the movie’s colossal budget. In a better (and less expensive) movie, Cruise’s character wouldn’t even have existed, and Katsumoto would be the main protagonist, resisting, to his final breath, Japan’s move into the new world; Wanatabe, an actor of towering authority, would have more than filled the bill.

Cruise himself, as compelling an actor as he is, is one of the movie’s problems, although he has a couple of great moments near the beginning. When Algren is first offered the training job by a pompous Japanese general, he suddenly breaks into a spell of maniacal laughter, and his cackling takes on an emanation of creepy dread rather then humor; it’s a jarring, lurid moment, and Cruise plays it perfectly. He has an undeniable sense of physical clout, which Steven Spielberg used to maximum effect in 2002’s great “Minority Report” without overstating it. Zwick, who never met a melodramatic moment he didn’t love, makes precisely that mistake, forcing Cruise’s screen presence to constantly call attention to itself, to the detriment of everything else.

The movie’s primary failing is its distinction between the bad guys and good guys. Zwick depicts the Samurai as the guardians of everything decent and true, despite their fondness for disemboweling themselves in the wake of the slightest personal failure and consigning their women to a life of abject servitude. I can think of no one (except perhaps the mad mullahs of Iran) who would argue that Japan, now a working, free-market democracy that has reaped billions throughout the tech revolution of the last thirty years, was better off when women had no rights and the general population lived and died at the whim of feuding warlords. For all its technical brilliance (the cinematography and set design are breathtaking), “The Last Samurai” seems too familiar, vapid and historically wayward to be called an “epic”.




Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older