Cast your mind back to 2003, a terrible, terrible Tom Cruise film entitled The Last Samurai which followed Cruise who played a military advisor that became so enamoured with the Samurai culture that he was hired to destroy, he downs weapons and joins them. Far too sentimental and entirely ridiculous, Cruise was well out of a depth in a culture that is constantly mined in Hollywood for both remakes and new film content.
This is the area 47 Ronin manages to find itself in, ignoring all the mistakes that the Last Samurai and remakes have managed to make and just exploiting Japanese culture for all its worth, the team behind the film have taken a very famous tale from Japan, which has been re-enacted in several plays and books, and managed to not only Americanise it, but also include some pretty bad acting.
It almost seems like Keanu Reeves has been missing from the big screen for quite a while, but the actor has actually been consistently working. However, this is probably the biggest project he has been working on to date, but let us stress, this is arguably worse than the Last Samurai and that, in itself, is an achievement.
47 Ronin tells the tale of the forty-seven former samurai who became ronin (samurai with no leader) following the ritual suicide of their master who assaulted a court official, the evil Kira. The Ronin are removed from their lands and warned to never come back and seek their revenge for what has past. However, two years later they are reformed by their new leader who wishes to avenge his master and his daughter.
Reeves plays Kai, a “half-breed” who was taken in by the Master when he was just a child. His mission in life was only to serve the Master who loved him and his daughter Mika, who he knows he can never be with. Kai joins the cause of the other Ronin and plans to take down Kira and the evil witch who guards him.
Are you still with us? We hope so because that outline above takes up the first hour of the film which drags along with very corny dialogue and a lot of confusion. A film which you would expect to have a lot of action has far more plot and story than it necessarily should have, which hugely works against it. There are no two ways about it, 47 Ronin is just boring.
Secondly, the acting across the board is atrocious. You can’t help but think that all of the cast are just speaking in English because this is an American production and to showcase Keanu Reeves. There is no doubt that if the production was filmed in Japanese with subtitles, it would certainly have worked a lot better in terms of authenticity and story telling. Reeves also doesn’t deliver whatsoever.
Overall, the film is just a mess. Avoid at all costs. There is nothing to see here.
