Taksahi Miike's latest (although it's hard to keep a tab on his output as he is inhumanly prolific) is a remake of a 1963 film of the same name and owes a tad too much to the Kurosawa classic,
Seven Samurai - perhaps the greatest of all samurai films, a benchmark with which every other
jidaigeki is a unfairly measured. Unfair, because
Seven Samurai is an indelible classic of grandiose action film-making.
13 Assassins offers a more than satisfactory action sequence, which eats up one half of the movie, in which cattle-on-fire, elaborate booby traps, and insane sword fighting ensue. This is the centrepiece of the story, in which 12 samurai and ronin, plus a wayward rambler-hunter, face a violent lord and his 200-strong personal army in a remote village in rural Japan.
