47 Ronin

The short version is – it was bad, but not nearly as bad as I had expected it to be.

The poster and trailer are misleading. It’s kind of ridiculous to promote the film on the basis of an image that centres on none of the characters from the main storyline – no Ouishi, no Kira, no Asano – but instead shows Keanu Reeves, the behind-the-scenes baddy, and then a mute warrior and Zombie Boy, who features for all of 4 seconds of screen-time. And then an image of burning ships in Dejima, none of which is an accurate representation of what happens in this film – including the dominance of Reeves. The trailer also led me to expect a very silly fantasy with almost nothing to do with the original pseudo-factual story, very possibly not even set in the Japan of our world.

Well, this was Japan-through-fanciful-Western-eyes. Daibutsu grow organically out of mountainsides and Tengu that look rather too much like they’re from Star Trek hide in misty temples testing outsiders to either kill or bless them. But that’s alright, because this is intentionally supposed to be fantastical and puts magical powers front and centre, both for a big special effects-laden climax and for a way to make Asano more sympathetic than in the original tale – rather than just driven to rage by insults, he is manipulated by a spell.

The main thing that doesn’t work here is Keanu Reeves. Not the performance, necessarily – he does as much as I think there was to do in the flimsy part, and obviously put a lot of work into the combat sequences – but his part in the story. There’s some interesting things to be said here about the place of the ‘other’ and how being foreign, especially half-and-half, is a shorthand for both not belonging and being able to somehow be possessed of advanced abilities, but mostly what comes over, constantly and unceasingly, is how the character does not deserve to be foregrounded and has been shoehorned into this story so that Americans will actually go and see it, because the wider public still cannot identify well enough with a non-White character. Much protestation may be made about this, but the fact is that to avoid being pushed into a world cinema-y subgenre, this sort of awkward addition is necessary – it’s crass, but it simply translates into ticket sales. Shame, but true.

But it just doesn’t work. There’s no real place in the story for this weird half-Japanese, half-British person who has a mysterious past, should definitely have been killed after pretending to be a samurai, and whose main function in the story is to (a) get weapons, (b) have a stone-cold romance and (c) be able to deal with the made-up magic witch with made-up magic of his own. Awkward and jarring throughout – and that’s before dialogue like ‘I’m not afraid of you.’ ‘You should be!’

Take him and the witch out, though, and you get a fairly solid retelling of the classic story with big names. A large chunk of the Japanese acting community who have previously appeared in Hollywood films are represented – cast members of Thor, Pacific Rim, Battle Royale (okay, not actually a Hollywood film, but big Stateside), The Last Samurai and, yes indeed, Mortal Kombat are in the film, as well as an obligatory pretty-boy – this one from Kat-Tun. There are changes to the original in order to affect motivations, some of which make sense, like having Asano be innocent of resorting to violence, and some of which don’t, like Ouishi not throwing off spies by pretending to be a drunkard and womaniser but being thrown into a pit and inexplicably released just in time to be able to ruin Lord Kira’s plans. The one pardoned Ronin is one we actually care about rather than the random messenger boy – though I think it’s more devastating when Ouishi Junior, age 16, has to join his comrades. The climactic action is changed from storming a house to storming a castle using a theatrical show, but otherwise it’s a fairly loyal retelling with some big-name actors and some nice moments of cheesy pathos. Actually flesh out some more of the Ronin using the time otherwise spent on Reeves and you could’ve had an interesting take. But then – probably not one that added much to the old classic in any case.

So there we have it. A fairly decent film masked by a tacked-on extra plot to broaden the appeal. I must say, I find myself wondering what the Japanese thought of this. Is it, as I suspect, rather like English audiences going to see a film version of Robin Hood in which there’s a magical half-Japanese Merry Man inexplicably always being centre-stage?