Movie Review - 47 Ronin

So I started this new blog and then immediately took a couple weeks off to spend time with family and friends for the holidays. OOPS. I wasn't the smartest decision maker there. Oh well. This last week I saw 47 Ronin, the new re-telling of the ancient tale staring Keanu Reeves.



47 Ronin is a film based off of a real life event of 47 samurai in the 18th century whose master is murdered and their plot to avenge his death. The story is famous in Japan and has been told in many facets and forms throughout the ages. This time, it's given a fantasy twist, with witches and demons and magic.

Overall, I liked the movie. Rotten Tomatoes had a score of 11% listed, and that essentially means it's absolutely terrible. But...it wasn't. It was a very...okay film. I would have given it somewhere around 50-60% myself. Though there aren't many surprises in store story-wise. Keanu is doing his best to be Keanu in this movie, meaning he gives an adequate if bland performance and does his best to be the most average thing about the film. The shining star of this movie by far is Rinko Kikuchi, who serves as the right hand of the evil Samurai master. She gets almost all of the cool action set pieces and gets to be delightfully evil and it's downright alluring. You can tell she's having fun with the role, which is nice, considering Keanu is straight-facing it throughout the film.

For other good things about the film I'd like to mention the rest of the cast. All of the Japanese cast do a fantastic job and add a level of realism to it. Though it makes no sense why they would all speak English, the thickness applied to said accent gave me at least a little relief that English was not their first language. Another good thing, the visuals. The film is very pretty, with the fire especially standing out in my memory as being captured well. There is a fantastical beast seen earlier in the film that looks absolutely magnificent. The dragon that Rinko's character turns into also looks amazing. Though in the beginning we see her as a fox and that does not look as great.

The things that let me down ended up mostly being about pacing and where the story went in the two hours they gave us. The story is of the 47 Ronin, Ronin meaning dishonored samurai who have no master. They explain this idea in the first couple minutes of the film. That means we know that the real story we are to follow is the story of 47 Samurai who hatch a plot to avenge their fallen master. That being said, we are given a good 30-45 minutes of Lord Asano, the Samurai master to be slain, and his men. You spend the better part of an hour knowing that the story you're there to see isn't going to start until he dies. Though I think that time does set up a great deal of the atmosphere and tone of 18th century Japan, it does drag the story down quite a bit when you think about what needs to happen and how long it takes to get there.

My other big complaint with the movie as it stood was what they did with Keanu Reeves. They open the movie saying how he's a demon. He's raised by these crazy lizard-like creatures that supposedly taught him all this crazy badass stuff on how to kill people. Yet, when we are shown what he can do, it's just some cool-looking fast movement. He can move really fast. It smelled of wasted potential for such a big build-up. Throughout the first hour of the movie he is seen as a lesser person because of his "demon" nature, everyone shits on him except for Lord Asano's daughter. You would hope he has some crazy badass powers for that kind of build-up, but instead he just moves really fast. Not bad in itself, it's certainly well done, but for that build-up the payoff is not equal.

I think the worst thing about the movie is how it's been marketed, or mis-marketed. I don't know what the hell happened, but Rick Genest, the guy who is semi-famous for having his body tattooed as a skeleton, is all over the marketing. As you can see in the official poster above, he's the second biggest character in the poster under Keanu. Outside of the theater I saw the film in there was a MASSIVE cardboard cut-out poster with the same four characters. So Rick Genest had a larger than life-size cardboard cut-out of himself on that poster. He even has his own individual poster. Every trailer has clips of him in it.

Rick Genest is in the film for all of maybe 30 seconds, and has one line in a cockney accent, which is odd because he's Canadian. There are more scenes in the trailers with him than are even in the film. He literally has one scene and one line, and yet he is fucking everywhere. But where in any of the marketing is our actual main character? You see, Keanu's Kai is not our main character. He's a very strong supporting character, and the catalyst of events of the film, but he is not our main character. Our main character is Hiroyuki Sanada, playing Oishi, the leader of the 47 Ronin. The story is more about him being the right hand man of Lord Asano, and how he's going to avenge his fallen master. It's Oishi's idea to round up the Ronin, and Kai. It's all him. And yet, he's nowhere in the posters. He's not in the official movie poster. His only purpose in the trailers is to explain that they are Ronin and they're going to kill their master's killer. But he's our main character and he's not represented anywhere, and yet Genest's character is everywhere and has maybe 30 seconds of screen time. What the hell.

Overall, the film isn't bad. I actually quite enjoyed myself. I do think however that it's misguided. I'm awaiting some sort of unrated or director's cut to appear when the DVD releases, because it feels like something is missing from the film, especially in regards to Genest. How could he be so trivial in the theatrical film and have him marketed so much if he didn't at one point have a much larger part? If I saw this movie on sale for $5 or under I'd pick it up. There are fun set pieces, the visuals are amazing, and Rinko and the rest of the Japanese cast give great performances, it's just a very uneven film.