I should disclose right off the top that I am no fan of Takashi Miike.  While I know of several very intelligent, legitimate movie buffs who respect him as a director, and there is a grudging admiration I have for his defiantly individualistic style of filmmaking, I have always found his excessively cruel and gruesome horror films lacking in anything redeemable…to me at least.  So it was with serious reluctance that I finally brought myself to watch his newest work, the samurai thriller 13 Assassins on Netflix, supposedly the Miike film for people who don’t like Miike.  I am mostly relieved with some reservations to announce that this is indeed the most palatable and possibly best film of his career.

The story is simple (very simple) enough, but is apparently based on actual historical events: 19^th Century Japan’s peace is being threatened by the young Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira, who may very well qualify as the year’s most loathsome movie villain.  He  rapes, massacres and degrades his subjects with a sense of vain entitlement, and desires to bring back the age of war for the sheer thrill of it.

I was mighty worried that the film would then divert into gratuitous torture, and while we do witness first-hand the depths of Naritsugu’s barbarity, it is portrayed with a measure of restraint and empathy for the victims unprecedented for the director.  It is still revolting to watch, but I never felt needlessly debased like I was with Ichi the Killer and Audition, and none of Miike’s torture fetishes (needles, wire hooks) ever made an appearance.  Even other sequences – such as the opening act of seppuku – do not rely on gore but performance to give them their visceral impact, and if there’s one thing this film is, it’s visceral.

Of course, any film about samurai must have an abundant supply of badasses.

Anyway, being as Naritsugu is the Shogun’s brother, he is untouchable, and so the high ranking official Doi Toshitsura makes a backroom deal with veteran samurai Shinzaemon to assassinate him.  From there, we follow a plot that is almost exactly the same structure as Seven Samurai and even with similar characters.  We have Shinzaemon and his war-weary friend/second-in-command Saheita (basically versions of Kambei and Gorōbei, respectively) recruiting a number of masterless samurai (rōnin) for a seemingly impossible quest before carrying it out in spectacular fashion.  However, unlike Kurosawa’s masterpiece, these samurai are more than willing to join this suicide squad for free (well, one of them demands payment), as their skills and years of training are becoming obsolete without any real battles to test them in.  In fact, Miike is quite keen on highlighting the paradoxical existence of samurai during the transition of Japan from the Edo to Meiji period.  They were a social class that existed purely to fight, and in the very beginnings of the age of peace struggled with losing their sense of purpose in ushering the very thing that they swore to uphold.  There is something poignant about such imminent extinction.  The samurai code is a standard that is so iconic and romantic, that the idea of such amazing warriors dying out not from battle, but from irrelevance can’t help but seem like a grander death of the traditional principles of honor and chivalry.

But samurai values, as with any worthwhile film about the samurai, are not treated with unwavering reverence, particularly their notions of loyalty.  Is one who serves as a samurai bound by duty to their master or to the greater good?  Most would probably – and rightly – say the latter without hesitation, but the samurai held incredible power at the time, and the mantra of unwavering loyalty to one’s master was a code to keep such power in check.  The idea of betraying that code, even to save lives, was something that people at that time were just not willing to deal with, which is underlined by Naritsugu’s servants’ desperation to please him even as he maliciously torments them in return.

These rich (but not previously unexplored) themes are augmented by equally rich period detail.  The costumes and sets all attest to the painstaking research going into them; sumptuous without being distracting or attempting to draw attention to them.  The village itself is an ingeniously designed set.  The whole location is a deceptively simple-looking town that is in fact an elaborate death trap.

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But of course the selling point of 13 Assassins is not, in fact, contemplations of centuries-old values or even its impressive production values.  What distinguishes this from other period epics is its notorious 45-minute action sequence, where our heroes square off against 200+ soldiers guarding Naritsugu.  It is pretty spectacular and easily the most virtuoso action climax I have seen all year.  The staging and choreography is remarkably controlled.  Unlike countless action blockbusters in the United States, I was never confused as to who was where or what was going on.  It’s paced extremely well so that the mayhem is frenetic but never incoherent.  Granted, the massive climax is not perfect.  The bad guys often follow the usual trope of surrounding our heroes and then waiting patiently while their comrades attack one-by-one with predictable results.  I also can’t figure out for the life of me why the bull attack – which looked obviously CGI’ed – was even included.

But those are relatively small quibbles in a sea of action that is far above what we’ve come to accept these days, not only well-executed but relevant to our investment in these characters.  Concluding on a fitting note, with violence-for-honor and violence-for-loyalty clashing in a final battle that ends with the idea that, perhaps, violence-for-anything just isn’t worth it when one can choose to live life.  These concepts aren’t exactly groundbreaking, and 13 Assassins, for all its handsomeness and scene-level genius is an awfully familiar picture that can’t help but suffer next to its obvious influence.  But a film needn’t reinvent the wheel to be worthwhile, especially when it is as thrilling as this one.

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