13 Assassins [Jûsan-nin no shikaku] (2010)

Depending on your point of view, 13 Assassins is either very familiar or very unusual.  For those with even a casual knowledge of Japanese cinema, the film is immediately recognizable as a remake of the better than average The Thirteen Assassins, a film that was a lesser riff on Seven Samurai.  As a remake of a film that was heavily inspired by a classic in the genre, 13 Assassins does little to deviate from the traditional story.  If you have no knowledge of Japanese films, 13 Assassins will feel like something altogether new and original–a period piece that doesn’t skimp on action, suspense, or blood and guts.  No matter which camp you come from, the film succeeds as a wholly entertaining action film.

Set in 1844 Japan, the film takes place after a long period of peace has been instituted by the previous shogun and continued by his son, the current shogun.  This has led to little need for the samurai warriors who still populate the countryside.  But peace is threatened by the shogun’s half-brother, Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki).

A sadist of the most brutal variety, Naritsugu takes pleasure in raping, torturing, and murdering anyone he chooses, even if they are nobility.  This causes a scandal that threatens the shogun’s power, but he refuses to do anything to punish Naritsugu.  This leaves Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira), the shogun’s head of justice in a difficult position.  Sir Doi knows that Naritsugu deserves to be punished, but he cannot go against the will of the shogun.  But when news spreads that the shogun plans to appoint Naritsugu to a political post–where he can do harm on a national scale, Sir Doi takes drastic measures to make sure this doesn’t happen by bringing in Shinzaemon (Kôji Yakusho), a veteran samurai who has all but retired to a quiet life of fishing in his autumn years.

Sir Doi’s request is simple: Shinzaemon is to assemble a group of samurai and assassinate Naritsugu as he travels across the country to return to his brother and take up his new post.  Shinzaemon recognizes he is being handed a suicide mission, but as a samurai long without a master, he is thrilled at the prospect of finding an honorable death while protecting the citizens from the reign of terror that is sure to befall them with Naritsugu’s increased political power.

13 Assassins feels very much like two different movies.  The first movie is a period piece  about the final years of the samurai in everyday Japanese life.  The second movie is a straightforward action flick that encompasses a jaw-dropping forty-five minute battle scene that is both exciting and vicious, stylized and brutal.  This sudden shifting of gears is slightly jarring and gives the film a schizophrenic nature, but both halves are so well-done that it’s a flaw easily overcome.

Director Takashi Miike is one of the true wildcards of world cinema.  Incredibly prolific–IMDB credits him with directing 84 films since 1991, counting theatrical, DTV releases, and television projects–and traveling anywhere his interests take him, he often brings his own nutty sensibility to routine genre films.  This has led to a number of misfires, but when he hits (Audition, Visitor Q, Ichi the Killer), the results are like nothing seen before.

That’s why it’s a surprise to find 13 Assassins to be such a traditional film.  Despite the slightly jarring nature of the narrative structure, this feels like a film that would easily have fit into the Japanese film movement of the ‘50s.

But traditional does not mean that Miike fails to add his personality to the proceedings.  Especially in the early scenes that showcase Naritsugu’s penchant for cruelty and violence, Miike is able to push the envelope when it comes to the portrayal of sadistic violence (the reveal of one of Naritsugu’s pitiable victims is one of the most horrifying images I’ve seen in a film this year).  And while the inevitable comparisons will be made to the House of Blue Leaves sequence from Kill Bill when talking about the climactic battle, Miike seems to be taking more inspiration from Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.  But even when approaching the violence of the battle in such an ugly, bloody manner, he still finds ways to include odd, stylistic choices that reminded me of the hilariously over-the-top climactic battle in Dead or Alive, his twisted take on a cops and gangsters film.  That these absurdist touches melded so seamlessly with the gritty realism present in the rest of the battle is a credit to Miike as a director.

Interestingly, where the film doesn’t feel traditional is the fact that it refuses to view the samurai code through the rose-colored glasses that so many of these films do.  This is shown through the competing viewpoints of Shinzaemon and Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura), the samurai bound by honor to protect Naritsugu.

Old rivals, Shinzaemon and Hanbei view duty and honor in two different ways.  Hanbei is personally disgusted by Naritsugu’s actions and fears what his increased political power could lead to.  But he believes that it is not his place to worry about such things–the only thing a samurai should concern himself with is the safety of his master, even if that means laying down his life for him.  Shinzaemon recognizes the end of the samurai way of life is imminent.  With no master to protect, he takes it upon himself to make the people of Japan his master, choosing to adapt the samurai code to changing times and put himself on the side of righteousness, even if it means destroying a fundamentally decent man like Hanbei to achieve his goal.  It’s an interesting and unexpected look at the way morality and ethics change as a culture evolves.

Along with Super, 13 Assassins is the most satisfying movie I’ve seen this year.  Purely as an action film, the climactic battle sequence puts most bloated studio blockbusters to shame.  Add in a healthy dose of philosophical soul-searching and it becomes that rarest of film species: an action movie with a brain.

It’s currently in limited release in select cities and available on demand.

Hanna (2011)

Hanna has been marketed as a cross between an art house film and an action flick.  While the film definitely boasts a more interesting and eclectic cast than most action movies, it eventually does nothing more than borrow bits and pieces from The Bourne Identity, Run Lola Run, and Léon.  This lack of originality doesn’t keep it from being an effective movie, but anyone looking for something new while getting their action fix may be disappointed.

Saoirse Ronan plays the titular character, a teenager who has been raised by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), in the frozen wasteland of the Arctic Circle.  They live in a cabin with no  modern conveniences, surviving by hunting for food and making clothes out of animal skins.  Erik not only teaches Hanna how to hunt, but also how to fight with any number of weapons and how to speak several different languages.  What he doesn’t teach her is how to interact with people like a normal teenaged girl would.

Deciding that her training is complete, Erik lets Hanna trigger a radio device that leads a team of CIA commandos to their cabin.  As part of a plan that’s not nearly as twisty as everyone in the film seems to think, Erik slips out before the commandos arrive, allowing them to find Hanna and take her into custody.  But the commandos weren’t looking for Hanna.  They were looking for Erik, who turns out to be a former CIA agent, believed to have killed his girlfriend–Hanna’s mother–before disappearing over a decade earlier.

The commando team takes Hanna to a highly classified facility where a CIA agent named Marissa (Cate Blanchett) eagerly awaits her arrival.  It seems that Marissa was Erik’s handler before he went rogue and his reappearance has shaken her.  But she takes a special interest in Hanna’s existence.  While scientists do blood tests on her, Hanna is interviewed by a psychiatrist as Marissa watches via video.  When Hanna specifically asks to speak to Marissa by name, another agent, wearing a wig to help her match Marissa’s general appearance, enters the room.  Before anyone can react, Hanna has broken the impostor’s neck, shot several guards and escaped from the facility.

So begins an international chase, as Hanna, who believes she has completed her mission to kill Marissa, makes her way across Morocco and Europe to meet up with Erik in Berlin.  But hot on her trail is Marissa and a hired goon (Tom Hollander) who is able to do unsavory things the CIA won’t allow Marissa to do in her pursuit.  But why does Marissa have such an obsession with catching up to Erik and Hanna while keeping her superiors in the dark?  Why were the lab technicians surprised and confused by Hanna’s test results?  And why does Erik want Marissa killed so badly that he would raise and train his daughter for this one specific purpose?  All of these questions are eventually answered, but the answers are so basic and unimaginative that they suck some of the momentum out of the film during a third act that should be alive with excitement and suspense.

The director, Joe Wright, is known more for Oscar-bait films like Atonement and one of the approximately five thousand adaptations of Pride and Prejudice.  While he does a more than commendable job with the action beats in Hanna, he fails to cover up some of the more glaring plot and character holes in the screenplay by Seth Lockhead and David Farr.

The character of Hanna, in particular, is a mess of contradictions.  In one scene, she is confused and frightened by such mundane modern conveniences as a ceiling fan and a television, in another scene, roughly forty minutes later, she is expertly navigating the Internet.  This change is supposed to be explained away by a mantra that Erik drills into her head: “Adapt or die.”  But we never get to see the actual adaptation process.  How does Hanna even know what the Internet is, much less know to go to an Internet cafe and teach herself how to use it?  Yes, she is supposed to be a supremely intelligent girl, but it feels like a cheat that the audience is expected to accept that she’s smart, so she just knows the Internet exists and she can extract information from it.  It’s a frustrating bit that pulled me out of the movie and could have very easily been explained if Wright would just take the thirty-seconds needed to show Hanna observing other people using the Internet.

Unfortunately, the script also relies on the annoying ploy to have characters act dumber than they are to move the action along.  Erik is shown time and again to be intelligent and paranoid, allowing him to avoid capture.  When he is confronted by various bad guys, he displays a ruthlessness and ability to improvise that tell us more about his character than any of the flashbacks Wright uses to flesh out the tragic backstory that links Erik and Hanna’s mother to Marissa.  But then his character makes several monumental mistakes in the third act that are completely out of character.  Simply put: Erik is turned into a bumbling idiot to move the plot in the direction of its foregone climax.

Even more annoying is the attempt by Wright to frame the movie as a twisted fairy tale.  The only fiction book that Hanna has read is a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the climax of the film takes place in an abandoned Brothers Grimm-themed amusement park.  This leads to several forced metaphors turning Marissa alternately into the wicked witch, an evil stepmother, and the Big Bad Wolf (although this aspect of her personality is presented in a clever visual gag as the dental hygiene-obsessed Marissa uses a magnifying mirror to check her teeth after brushing and flossing until her gums bleed).  But if Marissa is supposed to represent the evil antagonist and Hanna is the little girl lost in the woods, what role does Erik embody?  Is he the ineffectual father figure who is easily duped by the evil stepmother?  If so, this description is the exact opposite of the paranoid and dangerous Erik.

But attempts to tell a modern, violent fairy tale are swept aside as the film hits every predictable action beat.  The fact that it delivers on the action front despite Wright’s fumbling of the characters is actually impressive.  Much of this success is due to the driving score by The Chemical Brothers and Ronan’s endearing, heartfelt performance.  It’s hard to think of another young actress who could have so believably expressed the horror and confusion that she displays in the film.  Without her, the already glaring problems would have been magnified to an inexcusable level.

Despite all my complaints, it’s hard not to like Hanna as just a simple action film.  If Wright had played the the proceedings as a straight up revenge flick, I probably would have liked it quite a bit more just because of Ronan’s performance.  But the pretentious sheen he brings to the film actually holds it back and raises expectations to a level that the simple script is unable to match.  Sometimes an action film really is just an action film.  Such is the case with Hanna.

Super (2011)

Super is the type of movie that thrills me by its very existence.  It’s a whacked-out burst of intelligent, inventive filmmaking that does a great job of juggling wildly shifting tones while never forgetting where the heart of its story rests.  I watched the film with a huge smile on my face as writer-director James Gunn weaved a tale of violence, sex, drugs, and psychosis around a touching and sad performance by Rainn Wilson.  But as the film went on, I experienced a horrific feeling of helplessness and frustration that makes me want to repeatedly punch Gunn in the face.

But I should give the film a proper review before I enter into the sticky personal reasons why I want to introduce my fist to the side of Mr. Gunn’s head.

Frank (Wilson) is an awkward loser.  He works a dead-end job as a cook at a greasy diner in an economically depressed city.  He knows he’s a loser.  As the film opens, he explains through voiceover narration that he has had two moments of true happiness in his life: the first was when he married his wife, Sarah (Liv Tyler), and the second was when he pointed out where a criminal went to a police officer.

But Frank is slowly losing Sarah and he knows it.  When she leaves him for scummy drug dealer, Jacques (Kevin Bacon), Frank isn’t surprised, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not angry.  Unfortunately for everyone involved, Frank turns out to be more than a socially awkward schlub–he’s actually a mentally unstable giant who is prone to intense hallucinations.  When these traits are mixed with the pain and anger he feels from Sarah’s rejection, he quickly goes off the deep end.

Taking his latest hallucination (which is rendered through striking and grotesque special effects) to be God speaking to him, Frank takes inspiration from a Christian television superhero named The Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion) and fashions himself a homemade costume.  Calling himself “The Crimson Bolt,” Frank starts fighting crime in a brutal style that finds him flinging himself at drug dealers and thieves before caving in their skulls with a pipe wrench.  As he works toward an eventual clash with Jacques and his goons (Michael Rooker, Sean Gunn, and Stephen Blackehart), Frank reluctantly picks up a sidekick in Libby (Ellen Page), a foul-mouthed employee at a comic book store with a passion for ultra-violence and a libido to match.

Super may sound like a comedy, but to describe it simply as such is to do it a disservice.  To be sure, it is very funny in places.  But Gunn does a smart thing and never makes fun of Frank as a human being.  Some of the things that happen to him are funny in a mean, life is truly unfair sort of way.  And while his reactions to events can be amusing to the viewer, given the context of the film, they’re never funny to Frank.  Frank is really a tragic character.  A doughy, odd-looking man with a damaged psyche, he’s a character who should be pitied, even as he descends so far into madness that he escalates the violence to fatal levels.

Wilson helps this portrayal by leaving his persona from The Office behind and playing Frank straight.  He’s a man going through severe psychological pain who finally snaps.  There’s nothing funny in that description and Wilson goes for and achieves a sad, heartbreaking tone that grounds the film’s sometimes outlandish plot twists in a realistic central character who is as damaged a human being as I’ve seen put on screen in years.  But thankfully, he’s also not just a complete sad-sack.  Frank is self-aware enough to know that he’s on the wrong side of the law and his initial resistance to Libby joining him as his sidekick elicits some nicely constructed comic dialogue that Wilson delivers in a perfectly wry sense of humor.

The rest of the cast shapes up quite nicely.  Gunn is either the most well-liked man in Hollywood or the most effective salesman to pull together such a deep cast.  Fillion and Rooker are veterans of Gunn’s brilliant Slither.  As is Gregg Henry who shows up as an ineffective cop who has dealings with Frank.  But add to this already impressive line up Page, Linda Cardellini (in a throwaway cameo), Andre Royo (Bubbles!), Bacon, and Tyler and you get a talented cast that would put most major studio productions to shame.  Even more impressive is that they all do great work that elevates the occasionally thin characters.  Rooker, Page, and Bacon, in particular, help prop up the film through a second act that occasionally lacks forward momentum.

Gunn has talked openly about Super being more of a reaction to comic books than to films based on comics.  Not being a comic book guy, I have to take him at his word on this point.  But for non-comic book nerds like myself, the film works just fine as a vigilante/revenge film that coasts in and out of surreal territory.

While successful, it quickly becomes obvious that Jacques is kind of an idiot.  This idiocy doesn’t make him any less dangerous, but it does make him the perfect villain for Frank to go up against.  These are two violent men who are successful at what they do–often through sheer luck and ignorance of the consequences of their actions.  Their conflict builds to unexpected heights as the body count ramps up in the third act, leading to several gasp-inducing moments of graphic, bloody violence that is only slightly lessened by Gunn’s use of comic book graphics.

The film isn’t without problems: The subplot with Frank and the cop eventually goes nowhere; as a character, Libby is all over the place before Gunn and Page finally settle on playing her as a giddy sociopath; an implied moral conflict for Abe (Rooker), Jacques’ main henchman, is never developed beyond him shooting some disgusted looks toward his boss.

But for the few moments that fail to work, there are many great scenes, characters, and plot twists that do: the flashbacks set to Cheap Trick’s If  You Want My Love that show the desperation that drove Frank and Sarah together; a comedic montage that has Frank and Libby acting like kids in a candy store as they shop for weapons; the vision Frank has of God literally opening up his skull to plant an idea in his brain; the true horror of Sarah’s drug addiction.  It’s a miracle that these disparate moments and the wild tonal shifts they bring not only work, but push the film past a simple comedy/action exercise into emotionally effecting territory.

But if there’s one reason above all others to see Super, it’s to support a great movie that the studio system would never produce.  Gunn produced the film independently, on the cheap.  If it’s not playing at a theater near you, you can catch it on demand.  For everyone out there who is sick of the unoriginal drivel that the studio system is cranking out, you won’t find a more exciting movie than Super.

Okay, the review portion of this post is over.  Before I get into why I seemingly want to challenge Gunn to a bare-knuckle boxing match, I do want to address the grumblings I’ve heard that Super is nothing but a knockoff of last year’s Kick-Ass.

Beyond the basic idea of a person with no superpowers donning a homemade costume to fight crime, these two films diverge wildly in both plot and tone.  While Kick-Ass started out in a real world environment, it quickly turned into a straightforward–if excessively violent–comic book movie with the main character gaining a superpower in the inability to feel pain and the introduction of the characters of Hit Girl and Big Daddy.  Super, for all the absurdities it piles on, tries to stay grounded in the real world.  Frank never gains a superpower, the violence is never played for laughs, and the sticky moral questions it raises are not ignored.  I really enjoyed Kick-Ass.  I thought it was a thoroughly entertaining bit of escapist entertainment.  But Super aims higher, giving a sometimes uncomfortable look into the darkness that would drive a man to pick up a pipe wrench and start bashing in skulls.  Yes, it has some laughs, but Gunn is playing the material in a much more uncomfortable tone that makes the audience question whether they should be enjoying the mayhem.  That’s a pretty impressive feat for a man who got his start writing movies for Troma.

So if I love Super so much, why do I want to go all Crimson Bolt on James Gunn?

Roughly one year ago, I finished work on a spec script that I consider to be the best thing I’ve ever written.  Since I’m my harshest critic, the fact that I can still read through this script and love it, is saying something.  I wrote it more as a writing sample than anything else.  It’s a satire that skips from one genre to the next with abandon–a thriller that turns into a romantic comedy before taking a left turn into horror and finally landing firmly in dark character study territory, it’s not exactly mainstream material.  But it’s a damn good script and I’m very proud of it.

Aside from falling in love with two of the most fleshed-out, complicated characters I’ve ever managed to create, I was taken with the script’s originality.  Of course, there’s no such thing as a truly original story and my script definitely reflected elements of other films, but I had never seen these elements put together in such an ambitious, playful manner.  And then I saw Super.

Through the first act of Super, I was thoroughly entertained by and engrossed in the story.  It wasn’t until certain plot points and character motivations in the second act that I began to notice similarities between Gunn’s script and my own.  By the time a major plot twist occurs in the third act, I felt like I was watching a somewhat altered, but still recognizable adaptation of my script.

I want to make this very clear: I do NOT think Gunn ripped off my script.  I know that his script has been floating around for several years.  Outside of the readers employed by the Nicholl Fellowship competition and a few literary managers and production companies that asked to read it, my script has not exactly made the rounds in Hollywood.  At the same time, I want to be clear that I had never read or heard of Gunn’s script when I wrote mine.

Granted, there are several differences: my script does not kick off with the idea of a man trying to become a superhero, my main character is not as outwardly insane, my main character does not exclusively target criminals, and my script eventually goes to much darker places.  Perhaps the biggest difference between my script and Gunn’s script for Super is what we’re each targeting: Gunn’s script is going after comic books while mine eventually reveals itself to be a satire of quirky, independent film clichés.

I suppose I should quit worrying.  After all, the truly original stories are few and far between.  The difference between stories that feel unique and stories that feel old and tired is how they’re handled.  The fact that Gunn made something that feels unique and dangerous should be applauded.  That he was able to get it released into theaters is worth celebrating.