I was first introduced to the films of Takashi Miike by my friend Matt who recommended I see Audition, which Miike directed. “The first half is a romantic comedy, the second half is a horror film,” Matt told me. Matt and I share similar taste in movies, so I checked it out. Audition is about a widower who holds “auditions” for a new girlfriend. The woman he chooses initially appears to be sweet and shy, and the man is completely smitten. SPOILER ALERT: Turns out she’s a complete psycho who ends up torturing the poor guy.
Sufficiently disturbed, I talked to Matt about the movie next day and told him how horrified I was with the scenes of intense violence Miike staged, particularly the scene where the woman amputates the man’s foot with a section of piano wire. Matt’s response? “Oh, that’s nothing. If you want to see some really crazy shit, you should rent Ichi the Killer.” So, I did. And, guess what? Matt was right. A man getting his foot amputated was NOTHING compared to a guy willingly cutting out his own tongue, another guy hanging by his back from meat hooks through the skin and getting boiling hot oil poured on him and another man getting split completely in two (vertically) and having his guts spill out all over the floor.
Imagine my surprise when I recently watched Miike’s latest movie, 13 Assassins and found the violence to be relatively tame. Sure, a lot of people end up dead, but for the most part, we are spared close ups of guys getting limbs severed, guts spilling on the floor and other horrible things that I had associated with Miike. Hell, the movie’s climactic battle is less graphically violent than a similar samurai showdown in Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 1.
13 Assassins is fairly conventional for a Miike movie. It takes place in 1840s Japan and concerns Lord Naritsugu, an evil man who rapes and kills at will. The titular assassins are hired to kill Naritsugu before he is appointed to a position of power by his brother, the Shogun. The first half of the movie is devoted to two things: the recruitment of the assassins and the cruelty of Naritsugu. There is no doubt that the man is cruel for the sake of being cruel and that he deserves to die. The recruiting scenes are pretty much what you’d expect from a movie like this. Each potential assassin meets with the leader, Shinzaemon and proceeds to show him exactly how they will be valuable to his cause.
The second half of the movie is all-out warfare. Naritsugu is making his way home along with 200 guards and the assassins decide to ambush the caravan in a small town that is along their route. The thirteen assassins proceed to lay waste to the caravan, using explosives, swords and arrows. For 50 or so minutes, we’re treated to some impressively choreographed samurai action. Miike never resorts to shaky-cam and we are always aware of where the characters are in relation to one another. Shots are held for longer than a half second, allowing us to bask in the brutality without feeling overwhelmed by it.
If there’s one weakness with 13 Assassins, it lies with the character of Naritsugu. The man is just a little too cartoonish. Obviously, Miike wants us to loathe him, but in the end, he’s a bit of a cliché. He uses his power to rape and kill the innocent, and remarks how “fun” the battles are as they’re happening. But when he is finally faced by a man more dangerous than himself, he ends up whining and sniveling like the coward he truly is. It’s still satisfying to watch Naritsugu finally get his comeuppance; I just wish there could have been a little more nuance to him.
Of course, asking for nuance in a samurai movie is probably like asking for a Kevin James movie where he doesn’t fall down. The genre is concerned with men who have honor and men who do not. There is no gray area. 13 Assassins is gorgeously shot with expertly staged fight sequences and a restraint not often showed by its director.
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