Directed by Takashi Miike
(R)
***
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If you only paid attention to samurai movies made by the Japanese director Takashi Miike, you’d still have a lot to choose from, said G. Allen Johnson in the San Francisco Chronicle. This one, his 83rd in 20 years, proves that “he could be a great filmmaker if he’d only slow down.” A remake of an obscure 1963 movie, it’s about a team of warriors assembled in the 1840s to take out “a Qaddafi-like megalomaniac,” and “it’s a real, albeit bloody, treat.” The film’s “initial pleasures are modest,” said Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. A lot of time is spent on the recruiting of the assassins, so it helps to be a connoisseur of likable rascals. Regarding the film’s final 45 minutes of “elegant mayhem,” however, “little should be said, other than, ‘Wow, wow, wow.’ Also, ‘Wow.’” Few filmmakers “juxtapose cruelty and beauty as audaciously” as Miike, said Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times. Simply put, 13 Assassins “is a classic samurai movie, right up there among the finest in the genre.”
