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Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The acting in this movie is really good.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

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.

It's Feudal Japan. Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira is a cruel master and also a rising star. Shinza is convinced to assassinate Naritsugu and he recruits 11 samurais. They plan to ambush him on his trip back to the Akashi land. The men get lost in the mountains and meet hunter Kiga Koyata. The 13 assassins fight overwhelming odds after converting the town of Ochiai into a fortress.It's a samurai movie with big action and a solid story. The story is well laid out although I would have preferred it to be snappier. Samurai movies do have a lot of ponderous expositions. The lady with no arms is creepy. Also some of the assassins don't get enough screen time. There are 13 of them. However it doesn't get better than the big giant samurai battle in the last act.

Takashi Miike, better known for darkly funny and sadistically violent fare like AUDITION and ICHI THE KILLER, delivers an excellent period samurai film which also comments on the nature of honor, bushido and the concept of the samurai itself. The plot is rather simple: a group of 12 samurai (plus one other person they meet on the way) have decided it's in Japan's best interest to kill a lord with ties to the Shogun. The reason, well-established in early scenes, is because of his reckless disregard for human life. The first half is concerned with how the samurai conceive their plan and the second half is the execution of the plan, which is glorious and bloody. There was a lot of attention paid to the characters and their various motivations, and the story unfolded at a very nice pace: not too fast and not too slow. Also, being a Takashi Miike film, there was a couple of elements which put his stamp on the material (which is a remake). One is a particularly graphic suicide which opens the film, and the other is a naked, limbless woman without a tongue. One thing I did like about the movie was the meta-comments that were made on the concepts of bushido and the samurai, which completely removed any romanticism that might have at one point been associated with them. These ideas are expressed mainly through the 13th assassin and the lord (Naritsugu) who they're on a mission to kill. In such a stunning film, the only thing I can really complain about are some obvious CGI bulls (which are on fire) that appear in the second half. Other than that, this is an impressive movie no matter which way you look at it. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Japanese samurai films.