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After he is captured in battle, an American soldier starts to quite dig the Samurai culture that he’s supposed to be getting busy obliterating.
Starring Tom Cruise, Ken Watanabe, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Timothy Spall, Hiroyuki Sanada
Written by John Logan, Edward Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz
Produced by Marshall Herskovitz, Edward Zwick, Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner
Duration 154 minutes
You know, you try to judge a film on its own merits. Not everything must aspire to be great art, or follow a familiar narrative path, or be blazingly original. As Robert De Niro tells a baffled John Cazale in THE DEER HUNTER, "This is this."
But when sitting down to watch THE LAST SAMURAI, I couldn’t blank out one thought that ran through my mind on repeat: "How much will it resemble DANCES WITH WOLVES?"
First, let’s talk about Tom Cruise. I like Tom Cruise. By that, I mean I like his contribution to cinema and his place in its history. I’m not interested in him personally and wouldn’t deign to focus on gossip and hearsay – he can believe in what he wants and be as eccentric on as many talk shows as he wishes. (I will say that he’s supposed to be generous and professional on set, and I've heard this first-hand: a plasterer friend of mine worked on 2017’s THE MUMMY at Shepperton Studios).
No, what I'm going on about is what Cruise represents. He is really the last of the old-school movie stars. Despite entering his 60s, he’s not fading away (his top grossing movies are 2022’s TOP GUN: MAVERICK and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE FALLOUT from 2018) and he remains a leading man, rather than making the late-career switch to character actor or villain, as many do.
And by ‘old-school’, I mean big in the late ’80s and into the ’90s, the period when the star was still everything. Kevin Costner? TV actor now; ditto Harrison Ford, despite reaching for Indy’s fedora one last time (in what turned out to be a pretty limp and desperate move). Mel Gibson? Reputation forever tarnished it seems; I suppose the jury’s still out on Will Smith.
Bruce Willis has retired for health reasons. Arnie? Stallone? Eddie Murphy? Jim Carrey? I guess Tom Hanks is up there too, but he hasn’t starred in any ‘last’ films, so I won’t dwell on him. From the ladies, you’ve really only got Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock; you could make cases for Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman, too.
But despite my fondness for The Cruiser, his mega-wattage presence added an additional distraction to a critical analysis of THE LAST SAMURAI, morphing the abovementioned nagging question into "How much is it Tom Cruise trying to do DANCES WITH WOLVES?" – and even as far as ‘Did Cruise do this movie because one day he was pondering, “Hmm, if Kevin Costner can be a white saviour to America’s indigenous people, can I pull it off for the samurai in Japan?”’
OK, onto the film itself.
It’s the 1870s. Cruise enters the picture drunk, bloodshot and disillusioned. He’s a war hero, reduced to pantomiming his exploits on stage to flog Winchester rifles and working for the reliably slimy William Atherton (Walter ‘It’s true, this man has no penis’ Peck in GHOSTBUSTERS and Dick "Did ya get that?" Thornburg in DIE HARD).
He’s soon tapped up by government-types for a gig in Japan, where he’ll get the chance to pal around with Timothy Spall and Billy Connolly while training up some Japanese ‘savages’ in the art of warfare – the idea being that they’ll then be better equipped to defeat some rebels, a group of samurai who are not too keen on their new emperor. Eager for more beer money, Cruise accepts, and is soon showing villagers that you've really gotta lean in with the stock against your shoulder, and how to reload with that stick thing they used to have to poke down the muzzle.
That is, until he’s captured by Ken Watanabe’s samurais in a one-sided battle. For a while, Cruise is your regular disheartened POW, spending his days supplementing his alcoholism with sake and having even more PTSD battle-flashbacks than usual. But, in time, he starts to respect the samurai culture and gains their trust, eventually training in their ways and buddying up with Watanabe.
So, the samurai are the good guys of this story. But who could the genuine enemy be, if it’s not the American intruder or the emperor-supporters he was training up? Only Goddamn ninjas, that's who! And it's when defending his new pals against a night-time raid that The Cruiser really ingratiate himself – and starts to get real close to Watanabe’s sister.
If you’re familiar with the plot beats of DANCES WITH WOLVES, then it might sound like my fears were well founded. But, in fact, THE LAST SAMURAI is really a kind of inverted version of the 1990 Best Picture winner. The white boy doesn’t really change or ‘save’ anyone; rather it’s them who make the profound difference to his life. The title doesn’t even refer to Cruise, but to Watanabe – like if the Costner movie had instead been called KICKING BIRD, after Graham Greene’s Sioux elder.
So, all in all, a pleasant surprise. And the film holds up, in no small part due to Mr Reliable in the lead.
Something else surprised me about the movie, only this time in a not-good way: I wasn’t too keen on the Hans Zimmer score. It’s a bit of a generic regurgitation of better themes from his THE THIN RED LINE, GLADIATOR, BLACK HAWK DOWN era, only with a few Japanese flute noises thrown in.
I’d’ve much preferred it if he’d just trotted out some of his old cues from BLACK RAIN instead, maybe with those flutes replacing the ’80s synths. Ah, well.
Three stars out of five.
Valid use of the
word ‘last’? See review. They probably should have put the
subtitle ‘By the way, it’s not the bloke on the poster’.
What would a movie called THE FIRST SAMURAI be about? Hopefully it would be based on the side-scrolling Amiga-era
slash-em-up platformer of the same name. I like to imagine Ed Zwick hiding in his trailer and playing it non-stop
on the LEGENDS OF THE FALL set when he’s supposed to be prepping a scene or
whatever, doing his own ‘swish-swish’ sword noises and fantasising about making
his own samurai epic one day.
Previously: THE LAST HURRAH
Next time: X-MEN: THE LAST STAND
Check out my books: Jonathanlastauthor.com
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