47 Ronin: Looks authentic, but still yet to impress

I had never watched the original 47 Ronin. Being a story loosely based from the Japanese classic, there are lots and lots of creative liberty taken in this remake. I do not mind, in fact am interested since I am always fascinated with the Samurai culture, and Runonin Kenshin being one of my favourite manga of all time.



In this 47 Ronin, it is a simple story of honour and revenge. Being in the Shogun Tokugawa era, honour means everything. Lord Asano from the city of Ako is witched to harm another guest lord, and therefore sentenced to death by seppuku. The samurai under him, now being masterless, lead their lives in disgrace, and are known as ronin. After imprisoned for 10 year, the leader of the ronin, Oishi (really? that seems to be the original name, so no comment there), lead the remaining ronin for revenge and attempt to assasinate Lord Kira. Keanu Reeves stars as a half breed, basically mixture of Caucasian and Japanese bloodline, who is initially trained in some secret demi-God diety cult, and supposedly trained by the legendary Tengu (they do look bit human-like for a Tengu). Escape from the cult, Kai was taken in by Lord Asano but was treated as an outcast due to his mixed bloodline. Kai joined the fight for revenge and therefore completed the group of ronin.




There is a great deal to make the whole story believable. The sets, the architecture looks really authentic. Even certain custom appeared real. I am no Japanese to verify the authenticity of all the small matters, but they do look nice to a non-Jap. All these works well, until they speak in English. The whole show is in English, even when the Japanese characters speak to each other. It felt bit odd; even when I started to get used to it by the middle of the show, the dialogues are really cheesy at times, and full of all those zen-like sayings that are always stereotypical to Asian. It did not help when the Japanese character speak English, and although it is a good effort, they seems to struggle a bit. (or is it me, when most of them have lots of facial movement when they speak)


The action is fair, not great. In the poster, there are few character that I expect would bring lots of action but did not appear so. Even the witch played by RInro Kikuchi failed to come across as fearful. The dragon which she turned into in the last battle is rather cute than scary. In the end, the show lacks direction. It was not a fully action movie (action is so-so), not a fully CGI movie (just bit here and there), not a hero movie (the honour and revenge is shadowed by the cheesy dialogue), and neither a love romantic show (come on, how could the love story with cheesy lines be believable).

I felt rather disappointed, I did had some expectation for this show. After all the effort and work done on creating feudal Japan, the show is rather a poor result.

ratings: 2 poink!
comments: at least, this is way better than Man of Taichi.