samurai

Ronin (1998)

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I’m a simple man. If Robert De Niro whips out a bazooka in the middle of a car chase, I’m going to cheer like I’m watching sports and my team just scored. If he whips out that bazooka a second time, I’m going to fondly remember that movie for a lifetime, like my team won a championship. There’s something crassly, meatheadedly American about the 1998 espionage thriller Ronin, despite its distinctly European setting. On an intellectual level, there’s nothing any more complex to the film’s international power struggle between The Irish and The Russians on the streets of France than there is between any two teams in a Sunday afternoon NFL game. Both sides struggle for possession of a mysterious briefcase like it’s a football, running it up and down the proverbial field in their European sports cars. The main difference between these two sports, of course, is that the combatants of Ronin are free to fire bullets & missiles at each other in order to score easy points, which is something that would likely appeal to American football audiences if it weren’t for the mess of human causalities it would leave behind.

A lot of people die in Ronin; most of them just happen to be background actors, not main characters. Even Sean Bean manages to survive the vehicular gunfire mayhem, and he’s notorious for playing characters who bite it onscreen. It’s the poor bystanders shopping at fruit stands & fish markets, playing tourist at ancient ruins, and watching innocent figure skating exhibitions who get it the worst here, gunned down while trying to enjoy the Old World backdrop the high-speed gunfights are set against. Robert De Niro stars as the only participant in those gunfights who actively diverts his aim away from those potential victims, often pausing his mission to retrieve the MacGuffin briefcase to save a couple nameless bystanders along the way. He’s characterized as a noble murderer in that way, as indicated by his titular designation as a “ronin,” a masterless samurai who has taken to mercenary work but still abides by the high-minded principles of his disciplined training. So, when he fires a bazooka at a moving car, you know it’s for a just cause, not just because he likes to watch explosions as much as the slack-jawed audience watching at home. That bazooka saves lives, in a counterintuitive way.

Already in his mid-50s by the late-90s, De Niro was starting to appear a little old & creaky for this kind of lone-hero action thriller, which asks him to show off swift warrior reflexes and make out with young ingénues between the more plausible car chase sequences. However, the creakiest aspect of the script is the hero worship that puts him in that position in the first place. Ronin starts as a Reservoir Dogs-style heist plot where several international mercenaries who do not know each other are gathered on one uneasy team, feeling each other out as they put together a plan to retrieve their target MacGuffin. An ex-CIA operative turned masterless samurai, De Niro quickly proves to be the most competent and the most principled of the bunch, humbling the rest of the crew with stock bootstrap phrases like, “You’re either part of the problem, you’re part of the solution, or you’re part of the landscape.” From then on, every single scene is staged in service of making sure we know he is the smartest, toughest, coolest, classiest, handsomest hero to ever drive down the streets of Paris & Nice, while his new partners in crime can only gaze at him in awe. He is the star quarterback, and the rest of the team is only there to make sure he looks good.

Meanwhile, the actual hero of Ronin is director John Frankenheimer, who could’ve directed a cardboard cutout of Robert De Niro to the same thrilling effect. No star quarterback can thrive without the right coach calling the plays. Despite the muted browns & greys of the film’s Old World color scheme, Frankenheimer works overtime to bring an exaggerated cartoon vibrancy to the screen. De Niro’s briefcase-heist team is introduced in cartoonish widescreen closeups in their initial meetings, often framed in exaggerated split-diopter blocking. For the car case set pieces, Frankenheimer straps the camera to the front bumper, inches above the gravel that rushes past the audience to simulate a pure rollercoaster thrill. There’s a Friedkinesque approach to car-chase mayhem here, often driving down impossibly tight alleys and against highway traffic to cause as much demolition derby damage as the budget will allow. It’s unclear to me whether Frankenheimer was hired to direct French Connection II because he had already honed the skills needed to match Friedkin’s car chase expertise or if that’s the project where he learned the craft himself. Either way, he was shooting chases as well as the best of ’em by the time he made Ronin, which really goes the extra mile with its bazooka gags.

-Brandon Ledet

Crazy Samurai: 400 vs 1 (2021)

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I love a shameless gimmick, and few films are as up-front about theirs as the martial arts mini-epic Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1. It was originally called Crazy Samurai Musashi in its film festival run, but its marketing has since doubled down on highlighting its overriding gimmick right there in the title. Even official posters that stick to the original Musashi subtitle declare in large block letters “400 VS. 1 IN A SINGLE TAKE” just so you know what you’re paying for: a 90min movie with a continuous 77min shot of a samurai swordfighting 400 opponents to the death. Unfortunately, Crazy Samurai cannot live up to the movie you imagine in your head when you read that premise. It’s basically an SOV backyard movie with an exceptionally large cast, not a feature-length action set piece with an endless parade of expertly choreographed kills. Bummer.

Crazy Samurai starts at the climax of a three-hour samurai epic that was never filmed, assuming that the audience is already familiar with samurai Miyamoto Musashi’s reputation and his legendary battle with 400 fallen swordsmen. Fair enough; maybe we should be. If you aren’t, there’s no reason to show up for this single-gimmick movie except to see the hour-long swordfight, so why waste time. Unfortunately, despite the length of that battle, there isn’t much to see. Musashi is surrounded by a never-ending supply of swordsmen who take turns lunging at him and dying monotonous deaths – dispensed of with a quick swipe of his blade and a uniform spurt of CGI blood. If you watch the first five minutes of the fight you know exactly what the last five minutes will look like, as the sword violence never really escalates in any satisfying way. It’s more of a video game tutorial than a movie.

Crazy Samurai does for sword violence what Free Fire does for guns: making you numb with relentless repetition to the point where you never want to see the weapon again, like a concerned parent making you smoke an entire carton of cigarettes until you puke. Free Fire was a lot more fun to watch, though. The only hook that kept my attention in this one was the impressive physicality of actor Tak Sakaguchi as the (sometimes) titular samurai. Watching him swing his sword at literal hundreds of nameless goons for over an hour, I thought back to how sore I am after 15min of shoveling garden soil in my own backyard; he looks genuinely broken down by the end of the film, and you feel that exhaustion in your bones. Unfortunately, that’s the only thing that changes as the fight drags on, and it’s too gradual of an arc to hold your attention even at this short length.

In a best-case scenario, Crazy Samurai is a proof-of-concept prototype of a much better film that’s still to be made. There’s a brief epilogue obviously filmed years after the long-take centerpiece that delivers exactly what I wanted out of this movie, but it only lasts a couple minutes. You can practically hear director (and well-respected fight choreographer) Yûji Shimomura explaining “Here’s what I could’ve done with this premise now that I have access to better resources”, which makes me wonder why he didn’t just start over. There honestly isn’t much worth salvaging in this version except proof that it could be done. Maybe it was preserved & distributed out of respect for Tak Sakaguchi’s endurance-test performance, which is sweet, but the film’s in obvious need of a better-funded revision with more varied, harder-hitting kills.

-Brandon Ledet

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

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It would be dishonest of me to echo the complaints about how lackluster this summer’s movie offerings have been, since I’ve enjoyed so much of what’s been released, from major productions like Paul Feig’s unfairly-reviled Ghosbusters reboot & Shane Black’s neo-noir comedy The Nice Guys to weirdo indie outliers like The Fits & The Neon Demon. Where I sour on 2016’s movie industry output, however, is in those films’ box office numbers, which are dismal at best. Seemingly, the only movies able to make significant money in our current cultural climate are either bloated superhero spectacles or CG-animated films featuring talking animals. What’s frustrating me the most this week is that Kubo and the Two Strings, the latest masterful offering from the stop-motion animation marvels Laika, satisfies both of those requirements in its own way. It features both an in-over-his-head protagonist with superhuman abilities and his talking animal sidekicks and yet, like so many other great films this year, it’s flailing in its opening weekend attempt to recoup a significant fraction of its production costs. Kubo and the Two Strings alone is proof positive of 2016’s major cinematic conundrum: great films are being made; it’s just that no one’s paying to go see them.

Inspired by Japanese folklore & the rich cinematic past of samurai epics, Kubo and the Two Strings is at heart a story about the power of storytelling & the ways memory functions like potent magic. The film’s titular protagonist is a small boy who makes a living for himself & his disabled mother by telling stories for market place shoppers’ spare change in town. Kubo illustrates his own tales by playing his banjo-esque musical instrument, the shamisen, which brings to life colorful sheets of paper that fold into origami shapes & act out his stories as he narrates. What the townspeople don’t know is that the witches, samurais, and magic moon kings of Kubo’s stories are also a real life part of his past . . . which is why his tale doesn’t yet have an ending, a frustrating quality that always leaves his audience hanging. When that past catches up to him Kubo is caught in the middle of two opposing quests: his own mission to reclaim his deceased father’s armor and his witch & moon king enemies’ quest to steal his only remaining eye (finishing a job they started when he was only a newborn) and, thus, destroying his capacity for empathy & his free will. Kubo’s only company on this journey are a goofball beetle in samurai armor (Matthew McConaughey in his best performance since Interstellar) and a no-nonsense monkey (Charlize Theron, who’s just as fierce here as she was in last summer’s Fury Road). Along the way Kubo learns the responsibility & discipline necessary to command his magic abilities, but more importantly he learns that only he can bring a happy ending to his own story, however bittersweet.

A lot of what makes Kubo and the Two Stings such an overwhelming triumph is its attention to detail in its visual & narrative craft. As with their past titles like Coraline & ParaNorman, Laika stands out here in terms of ambition with where the studio can push the limits of stop-motion animation as a medium. The film’s giant underwater eyeballs, Godzilla-sized Harryhausen skeleton, and stone-faced witches are just as terrifying as they are awe-inspiringly beautiful and I felt myself tearing up throughout the film just as often in response to its immense sense of visual craft as its dramatic implications of past trauma & familial loss. The film also allows for a darkness & danger sometimes missing in the modern kids’ picture, but balances out that sadness & terror with genuinely effective humor about memory loss & untapped talent. What’s really impressive here, however, is its efficiency in storytelling. There isn’t a single image or element at play, from a woven bracelet to a paper lantern to an insectoid buffoon, that doesn’t come to full significance if you lend the film enough patience. Kubo and the Two Stings could’ve easily rested on the laurels of its visual spectacle, a result of infinite hours of painstakingly detailed labor in an animation studio, but it instead pours just as much care & specificity into its reverence for traditional storytelling. Nothing presented onscreen is wasted. This is narrative prowess at its most essential & efficient, an attention to craft reflected in the fact that the film’s protagonist himself is a storyteller & an animator in his own right and that his quest mostly centers on a desire to seize & steer his own narrative to a satisfactory ending. This film definitely falls into the category of cinema about cinema, art about art, but it doesn’t call attention to that conceit. It all takes naturally & beautifully as the plot continually folds in on itself like intricate origami.

What films do you consider the height of stop-motion animation as a medium? The Nightmare before Christmas? Fantastic Mr. Fox? Alice? Mary & Max? Kubo and the Two Strings easily belongs in the conversation at even a moment’s glance. The film boasts an impressive depth of visual detail & intricately mapped-out story structure, yet it’s remarkably light on its feet, leaving plenty of room both for moments of levity & for heart wrenching blows of emotional impact. Just watching the endless parade of bland talking CG animal kids’ comedies in the trailers preceding Kubo and the Two Strings, each more annoying & forgettable than the last, is enough of an eye opener as to why this film’s arrival in our current cinematic climate is such a goddamn relief. You owe it to yourself to watch this modern classic on the big screen and, please, bring a friend. The idea that there are no great films being released this year, that Hollywood is simply out of ideas and the world was somehow more creative or inspired in past decades is honestly getting to be more than a little silly. There are plenty of great films in the theater right now. We just need to get smarter about throwing our attention & dollars at them. I suggest starting with Kubo and the Two Strings. You could do far worse with your money than escaping the August heat in the air-conditioning, admiring a projection of a modern animation masterpiece in the comfort of public darkness.

-Brandon Ledet