Nobody was expecting the new 47 Ronin movie to be good — its long delays and problems have
become legend — but it’s bad in a particularly depressing way. This is a film
that’s not only boring and campy, but also kind of nonsensical, turning a classic
story of revenge and loyalty into a stew of crap.
Spoilers ahead…
The actual story of the 47 Ronin is fairly simple, at least
in its basic outlines: a minor lord, Asano, gets provoked into drawing his
weapon and striking his teacher, a powerful official named Kira. Asano was
ordered to kill himself by ritual seppuku,
and his followers were forbidden to take revenge. But they decided to take
revenge anyway, spending two years dispersing and plotting before carrying out
a stealthy assault and assassinating Kira. For their bravery and loyalty, they
were allowed an honorable death by ritual suicide, instead of being hanged like
common criminals.
The new movie preserves the bones of this storyline —
except that it has to make room for two elements that do not belong in this
film at all:
1) Keanu Reeves, playing a random foundling who’s an outcast
because of his “half-breed” heritage and because he was raised by
demons who look sort of like Buddhist Voldemorts. (I am so not kidding about
that.)
2) A whole fantasy storyline in which Kira is in league with
an evil shapeshifting Sexy Witch, who wants to help him take over Japan.
Perhaps because of those two elements being shoehorned into
the film, nothing in this movie entirely makes sense. As in, things just sort
of seem to be happening, because the plot has to keep steamrolling forward, but
the notion that this is a society with rules — and that the 47 Ronin are
heroes because they navigate a painful conflict within those rules, in order to
do the right thing — gets completely lost. In its place is a whole mess of
cliches.
So let’s take those three things one by one: Keanu, Sexy
Witch, nonsense.
Why is Keanu Reeves
even in this movie?
Keanu Reeves isn’t really the main character of the film —
Oishi (Hiroyuki Sanada) is the traditional main character of the story, and
even in this film he carries most of the main action. But he’s continually
being sidelined to make way of Keanu’s character, Kai, and the movie is
constantly bending over in weird directions to come up with stuff for Kai to
do, so it feels as though he might be the protagonist.
And Kai’s status within the film makes everything else seem
murkier, to the point where you’re not sure who any of these people are and
what they’re actually doing.
Basically, in the film’s lengthy prologue sequence
(everything in this film is lengthy, because your time is not valuable) we
learn that Kai randomly showed up as a teenage boy, running from the forest where
the Tengu demons live, with mysterious scars on his head. Because he’s
half-white, and because of the whole “demon forest” thing, the
samurai nearly put him to death for being a demon kid.
But their lord, Asano, saw something special in Kai. What, we’re
never sure, since Asano and Kai never seem to share any screen time together. Asano’s
daughter, Mika (Ko Shibasaki) also sees something special in Kai — in fact,
they fall in love despite everybody thinking that Kai is a demon-spawn
half-breed, and spend all their time holding hands and exchanging love tokens
and practically making out in Asano’s front rock garden.
What is Kai’s status in Asano’s household? No clue. He’s an
outcast, who lives in a weird hut, but
nobody seems to mind the fact that Asano’s only daughter is publicly, brazenly
in love with him. He hangs out with the samurai all the time, and accompanies
them on their samurai monster-hunting missions, and even disguises himself as a
samurai.
Later, when the 47 Ronin decide to avenge their master, they
realize they need Kai’s help because of his half-breed demon spawn asskicking
abilities. So Oishi has to go fetch Kai from the Dutch island (Deshima) where
Kai is being imprisoned and forced to do cage-matches against orcs for the
amusement of tattooed Dutch ruffians.
And Kai helps the Ronin to get some weapons from the demons
that raised him, which really are Buddhist Voldemorts. (They’re like
lizard-faced bald guys in Buddhist robes, who live next to a giant reclining
Buddha statue.) We’re told the demons have been ostracized for their beliefs
(and not just because they’re demons) but we’re never told what those beliefs
are, or why they were problematic. (For what it’s worth, Buddhism was not
forbidden in Tokugawa Japan, although it had a decline in popularity.)
In any case, the movie struggles to create a classic
“hero” arc for Keanu Reeves. He has to get the girl — or at least
save Lady Mika from having to marry the bad guy, Lord Kira. He has to gain
acceptance from the 47 Ronin, who wind up embracing him as one of them, and
from Japanese society at large. He has to overcome something or other.
Unfortunately, Kai doesn’t change at all in this movie —
and Keanu himself looks a little confused about what he’s doing here. He stands
around in the background of a lot of shots, and his expression never varies
from its standard “patient whipped puppy” mien. His presence pushes
the actual story of the movie off to the side, but he’s never able to move into the center and
become the actual hero. He’s just a minor supporting character who hogs the
frame.
The Sexy Witch Thing
First, the good news. If you liked Rinko Kikuchi in Pacific Rim, but really wished you could
see her as a sexy quasi-lesbian fox-witch who keeps trying to seduce Lady Mika
while eating sashimi using her prehensile hair as chopsticks, this movie has
you covered.
Rinko Kikuchi knows what sort of movie she’s in, and treats
every single line of villainous dialogue as another piece of sashimi to be
coated with wasabi and chewed at great length. She can’t just casually mention
“let’s take over Japan,” she has to purr operatically about how
they’re going to take over Japan, and everyone will bow down to them, etc. etc.
She is constantly falling out of her kimono while she’s climbing on top of Lady
Mika and trying to force-feed her with her hair chopsticks.
Now the bad news. The fantasy elements in this movie are
simultaneously over the top and incredibly boring, and they make no sense.
The opening voiceover of this film announces that feudal
Japan was a mysterious realm where outsiders were not allowed, and where
magical creatures roamed everywhere. And the movie pretty much sticks to that
— Japan is bursting with ogres and witches and demons, and people just sort of
take it in their stride. Nobody seems to have strong feelings about this stuff,
one way or the other.
And that’s kind of a hideous failure of world-building. You might
think that Japan would be a very different place if everybody knew there were
demons and witches all over the place, but nothing is different at all. Meanwhile,
things aresimultaneously over-the-top
and subdued. There really ought to be a word for “boring and campy”
— that thing where people are doing stylized acting and weird shit is
happening, but it’s not interesting or fast-moving enough.
And the notion of Japan as some kind of magical island of
wacky people sort of cheapens the central storyline of the film, too. Which
brings us to…
Nothing in this movie
makes any sense
All fantasy stories depend on rules, to some extent —
without a sense of how things work in the world and what makes sense to the
people who live there, you can’t be blown away by the fantastical elements.
But 47 Ronin, above
all, needs rules. The original storyline is totally dependent on the rules of
Japanese society — particularly, the rule which Asano breaks by drawing his
weapon and striking Kira. And the conflicting rules which require his followers
to avenge him, but also forbid them from doing so. Just the difference between
a Samurai and a Ronin requires a certain nuance in your understanding of Bushido, the Japanese warrior code.
But not only does 47
Ronin not explain any of these things, it’s so busy trying to make the two
aforementioned extraneous elements fit that everything seems random. Like, the
Shogun just turns up occasionally. He comes to visit Asano’s home, and his
arrival is treated with a bit of pomp, but then he seems to vanish for
stretches and it’s not clear where he and all his people are staying. Later,
the Shogun turns up towards the end of the movie to deliver the final judgment
on the Ronin, and it’s not clear where he sprang from. Everything is like that
in this movie.
Instead of getting a sense of a traditional society where
minor insults can escalate into huge incidents, things just seem random. People
do talk about honor a lot, though.
And it doesn’t help that director Carl Rinsch seems to have
no sense of geography — the fight scenes, especially the big ones, are filmed
in a way that makes it hard to tell who’s doing what where. And there’s the
aforementioned “fitting Keanu into the frame” problem. The camera
only seems engaged when there’s a beautiful CG creation filling the screen
which happens four or five times in the two-hour running length.
So even by the standards of bland fantasy epics, 47 Ronin is blander and dumber than most
— and it’s especially sad, because its kitchen-sink approach seems wasted on
the classic story it’s attempting to retell. It’s the turducken approach to samurai
cinema, except way, way overcooked.
