Very well written and emotionally disturbing film. The film depicts a Sadistic lord who is son to the Shogun; a tyrant, who uncontrollably murders without giving a second thought. People of the land have gotten fed-up with him and have organized a group of 13 assassins to overthrow the current ruler.The film was so captivating, it has to be one of the best films of this genre that depicts this era of Japan. Eerily realistic effects and gritty set designing makes this a must see if you are a fan of these type of movies.

Lately I have become interested in samurai films, so I have been watching quite a lot of them - from the entertaining Lone Wolf series to the Kurosawa classics, with the late legend Toshiro Mifune. Those old movies are great but they lack in good resolution and better color. So I came across this Japanese film "13 Assassins" filmed in 2010. Recent stuff, sounded interesting. So I watched it - very good production, with a stellar cast including a member of the Japanese band SMAP who plays the bad guy. The problem starts with the plot. It's the old "small group of brave samurai against bad guy with army in larger number" just like Seven Samurai, The Last Samurai and 47 Ronin. Here, the 13 assassins are gathered to fight a sadistic lord. Despite the fact that the plot is more of the same, this is a post-Hollywood, post-video game samurai movie. It has all the action, sound effects and visuals of the blockbusters, including bombs and boars on fire (yes)... and gore, lots of gore. It has disturbing scenes, like the amputated woman and even a non-explicit homosexual intercourse. The biggest problem for me is that the guy who hired the 13 samurai to kill the lord Naritsugu actually had the opportunity to finish the job at the bridge. He had his fellows pointing their guns to him (but that would make the film end at the 1 hour mark.) Anyway, this is entertainment for the young audiences, craving some ketchup. Great production but lacking substance.

It's histrionic and overwrought, and hard to believe if you don't buy it's premise of duty and conflict, set in Miike's beautiful and masterful style. But if you do allow Miike's unabashedly sympathetic portrayal of feudal Japan and the caste system of the Samurai to appeal to you, then this is an epic. It's also a positing of the modern Japanese questioning of the purpose of duty, of values trumping allegiance to a static system, and interestingly Miike doesn't have a neatly gift-wrapped answer in this film to Western observers who are curious about where modern Japanese identity is headed. So it's great fodder for dinner conversations!The pathos of the victims of the villain, the absurd and gory violence that Miike relishes and makes you sit through throughout the movie, the beauty of rural Japan, and his punctilious attention to beautiful traditional costume and architecture are all just wonderful elements of this film. Anybody can enjoy this movie, and walk away from it with a very rich aesthetic sense of Japanese feudal history. And so I think as a viewer you have to congratulate the director for making something which feels commercial and big budget and paced and crisply edited, and yet captures moments of ambiguity and moral complexity that make the experience of watching it very compelling.

I have found the film just OK. For my tastes it is really too old school. Directing/filming fights in this way, is for me prehistory. I do not like either films where all is special effects. But here all is just confused and flat. So many people fighting, no breaks, no special angles, direction is really straight and old school. There are moments that in my opinion are even ridiculous. I cannot understand how this film got to get 7,6 rating here and 96% in Rottentomatoes! That's just extremely exager-rated. Anyway, the acting is OK, and in the fights (which are concentrated in the last third of the movie) there are some good moments. But honestly I felt absolutely nothing watching this film. No tension, no emotion, no excitement, no epic feeling. And the characters gave me also absolutely nothing. The film is written and directed and shooted in a way that I felt just a distant observer of a flat scene.