Fans of the Western genre will appreciate the symmetry of this film. Back when Clint Eastwood was an actor instead of a director, he appeared in the film A Fistful of Dollars, a spaghetti Western based on the Japanese samurai movie Yojimbo. And now, mumble-mumble years later (I could look that up, but I won’t) one of his films has been reverse-engineered into a samurai movie all its own.
The good news is that it’s very good. The bad news is that it’s virtually a scene-for-scene remake, with few surprises. The guns have been replaced with swords, and the outfits are (mostly) different, but aside from that, most of the characterizations and the action is the same. Which is fine, really; it’s a remake, after all. It’s just that there was a lot of room in this story for newness based on the fairly dramatic cultural and historical differences, and that didn’t get as much consideration as I would’ve liked it to. Maybe the grim business of killing is the same in every culture, but I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed by the lack of invention.
Fans of Ken Watanabe, future Boyfriend of the Week, should definitely catch this one — he makes an excellent Clint Eastwood. But even better is his sidekick Akira Emoto, who not only plays Morgan Freeman’s character, but looks exactly like a Japanese Morgan Freeman. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, frankly. It was amazing how much they resembled each other.
Definitely recommended to fans of the original, but this film stands alone just fine as well, so if you hate gunslingers but love samurai, you’ll find a lot to like here for sure.
Genre: Western/Eastern, Foreign
Cast: Ken Watanabe, Akira Emoto, Jun Kunimura, Shiori Kutsuna, Yûya Yagira
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