We tried to watch The Last Samurai on HBO last night, on the recommendation of an innocent friend who loved it. (Only someone fresh out of Witness Protection and decades of substance abuse could be so innocent.)
Oh God, what an awful movie. A huge slab of solemn, big-budget Hollywood corn, slathered with every cliché in the book. Do you have to have been out of the United States to realize that people's lives in other places naturally revolve on their own axes, that Japanese samurai and villagers would not have gravitated to the first brave, scruffy white man they saw like obsequious iron filings around a magnet? Everybody onscreen worships the Tom Cruise character right along with the camera. Even the characters that hate him orbit him, unable to tear their eyes away. It's as aggravating as The Karate Kid, in which a dignified, grieving old karate master acts like a servant to a spoiled American teen-ager.
The narcissism is wince-making, the characters stock types — right down to the cute, brave little Japanese tykes — and the plot, painfully predictable. You know that the white guy will survive, while his wise, noble nonwhite friend will not. (Director Ed Zwick probably never heard of Leslie Fiedler's famous essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!", which nails this homoerotic Lone Ranger-Tonto cliché in all those American novels and buddy films that portray "a chaste male love as the ultimate emotional experience," especially when it's "the mutual love of a white man and a colored".) You know that the beautiful nonwhite woman, the friend's sister, will start out despising the white guy but then inevitably come to love him. You've seen this movie a thousand times. It is to Hollywood the same kind of bloated product that a huge, showboating gas-guzzler is to Detroit: a huge, dollar-guzzling sentiment machine, oiled by important, lugubrious music, that can jerk tears from your eyes even as you feel nothing but incredulous contempt. Yes, it's that bad.
I don't entirely trust my memory, but it seems to me the '80s miniseries based on the book Shogun, which had essentially the same plot, was much better. Its Japan definitely rang more authentically Japanese. At least the samurai threw Anjin-san, the Richard Chamberlain character, into a pit and pissed on him. But you can't piss on Tom Cruise, can you?
Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
It's a star vehicle, so the cliches were a little too predictable to bother me. I liked it. I thought it was exciting and the action scenes were well-directed. Also, the performance by Ken Watanabe was good.
2 - dbcooper
Such sacrilege!!! Pissing on Tom Cruise is akin to pissing on God. And if Tom is not a God, how else could he have survived that Gatling gun attack?
3 - DrPat
Amba, I have to agree that Shogun was a much better film. (The mini-series format allows for much more latitude in bringing a mong novel to the screen.)
But Last Samurai had Tom Cruise, and lots of "furriners" he could be taller than - what more could you ask for?
4 - gonzo marx
should have be named "Dances with Samurai" IMO...
if you want the tast..all of Clavell's books on the Far East are MUCH better
nuff said?
Excelsior!
5 - Bennett Dawson
To even mention this superficial movie in the same breath with Shogun is a crime against humanity. Woll okay, maybe the movie of Shogun deserves it, but the book itself is an incredible work.
I agree with Gonzo, anything by Clavelle is better than this cliched-to-death movie "staring" Tom Cruise.
But in particular I would reccommend "King Rat", a facinating story set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.
Gritty and disturbing, and entertaining at the same time.
6 - Phillip Winn
I would have thought Tom was shorter than the average asian man. Did they hire especially short asian men, or was it all camera tricks?
7 - amba
Maybe elevator shoes?
8 - DrPat
Now, Phillip, you know dissing Tom Cruise (especially in the vertical reach department) is sure to bring in the flame-fans!
That said, I thought when the first promos came out that Cruise had found his perfect location, and could ditch his lifts at last.
9 - Tom French
I'm amazed you were able to write after watching it. These rehashed, bullshit, fill up the 12 plex movies are so far from respectable it is pathetic.
10 - Tristan
Oh ~~~!
Let me count the ways I HATE Tom Cruise!
I think he is the worst actor~~~~~~~
shades of "Cocktail"...what a "fine" performance!!!
Cruise has the most flat one-dimensional acting ability I can think of.
Last Samurai on the other hand, I loved DESPITE Cruise! I can seldom watch any movie more than once (or re-read a book) -- Last Samurai I have watched over and over and over .
I love the spiritual values of the Samurai so seldom portrayed HONESTLY as they were in Last Samurai~~~seriously one of the few western movies to not ridicule the Oriental ethos of honor & integrity....
11 - Mat Brewster
The movie wasn't all that bad. The ninjas were cool at least.
For quality movies about Samauris see any of Kurasawa Samauri films (Seven Samauri, Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo) or practically anything starring Toshiro Mifune. Does IFC still have Samauri Saturdays?
12 - Bennett Dawson
Samurai Movie? Tarantino's "HERO" is so wonderfully over the top, with twists that make you gawk.
Granted, both this and Crouching Tiger use special effects to bring a magical feel to the fight scenes, but both rely on interesting story lines to justify the effects.
Great stuff!
13 - Rodney Welch
Zhang Yimou made Hero.