47 Ronin

Directed by Carl Rinsch.

2013. Rated PG-13, 118 minutes.

Cast:

Keanu Reeves

Hiroyuki Sanada

Tadanabu Asano

Rinko Kikuchi

Ko Shibasaki

Min Tanaka

Jin Akanishi

Masayoshi Haneda

Gedde Watanabe

We find out right away that Ronin are samurais who have disgraced their masters. Then, we don't meet any of them for a really, really long time. And the ones we do meet, we don't care about.

Oh, wait. I'm getting way ahead of myself.

Let's start with Kai (Reeves). A long time ago in a galaxy not far enough away, he's a young man who is the foster son of the good Lord Asano (Tanaka). However, since he's of interracial descent, Japanese and white, he isn't the most popular guy in town. You know things are bad when you non-chalantly answer to "half-breed." For this reason, and because he's played by Keanu Reeves, Kai seems eternally depressed and wears a blank expression on his face. That's before we even get to the real bad things that happen to him. That stuff starts when Lord Kira (Asano) and his personal sorceress, the very creatively named Witch (Kikuchi) show up. She tricks Lord Asano into committing a heinous crime for which he is sentenced to death. His right hand man Oishi (Sanada) is branded a Ronin and thrown into a hole in the ground. Asano's daughter Mika (Shibasaki) is told she will marry Kira in one year's time. Kai, our hero, is promptly sold into slavery. When that year passes, Oishi is let out of his hole, tracks down Kai plus 46 fellow Ronin, and go after Kira. This is all very loosely based on a true story. Really loosely. Matter of fact, if you have any knowledge of it, just scrap it for the purpose of watching this movie. Hell, I'm even going to pick apart my own summary of the film for you. Out of everything I just wrote, here's what you need to know: it's all over a girl. That's it.

Simple, right?

Wrong.

It should have been.

Instead, the movie plays out in an excruciatingly convoluted and increasingly boring fashion. It mixes Samurai lore with the purely mystical to less than thrilling effect. It's bread and butter should be sword heavy martial arts. When it gives us this, the movie is at least a little fun. Unfortunately, it spends far more time with our hero and his "friends" tip-toeing around in the woods talking to magical beings and spouting pseudo-philosophical declarations at one another. It wants to be Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins, but with a supernatural element. it's actually an even messier and far less exciting version of 2011's Conan the Barbarian, itself an incoherent slab of movie. This is definitely prettier, having some top notch production values. However, I'll say what I've said before. Pretty pictures do not a movie make. In this case, it's lipstick on a pig. That might make it a great looking pig, but I still don't want to kiss it.

You know what? I haven't even dug into Keanu Reeves' performance, yet. Or, should I say his lack of one? Truthfully, it's no more or less than what I expect. He gave us a non-descript villain in the better, but not great Man of Tai Chi. Here? You watch it and let me know if you detect a pulse. I'd say his rebranding of himself as a martial arts star isn't going too well. A quick glance at the numbers seem to refute my assessment, though. 47 Ronin stumbled its way to a $150 million take at the box office. However, you have to factor in what it cost to make such a beautiful mess. It had a budget of $175 million. Yeah, I'm right. Always.

Battleship

Directed by Peter Berg.

2012. Rated PG-13, 131 minutes.
Cast:
Taylor Kitsch
Brooklyn Decker
Rihanna
Alexander Skarsgard

Tadanobu Asano
Hamish Linklater
John Tui
Liam Neeson
Jesse Plemons
Gregory D. Gadson

I played a lot of board games as a kid. Monopoly and Life were my favorites. I was never big into Battleship, but I had friends that were. I remember the commercials far better than the game itself. They always end when one kid incredulously exclaims “You sank my battleship!” Some version of that iconic scene playing out at the climactic moment is pretty much all I expected the film version. Even those modest hopes proved too lofty.

Toy company Hasbro owns the rights to the game and apparently aren’t too particular about any sort of faithfulness to its properties. As long as whatever is thrown up on the screen brings in goo-gobs of money, all is good. Who could blame them? After all, they also own the rights to Transformers. Whether you love or hate those movies, there is no denying they’re ridiculously successful at the box office.

This brings us back to Battleship, the movie. The game is one of naval strategy, your fleet against your buddy’s. The movie is about an intergalactic alien invasion just off the coast of Hawaii. Wait…what? Okay fine, I’ll roll with it. After finally finding a planet similar enough to Earth to sustain life we send out a signal in an effort to make contact. Never you mind that it’s travelling billions of miles yet appears to get there quicker than most cell phone calls. Just know that whoever is on the other end sends back a military scout team to set up their own communication with their boys back home and commence the takeover.

Before any of this, we meet Alex Hopper (Kitsch), a long-haired hothead with a penchant for trouble. He’s infatuated with Samantha (Decker), the blonde at the bar who very strongly resembles a swimsuit model. By the way, her dad happens to run the local Naval fleet. Fast forward a year or so and now Alex is a short-haired hothead Naval lieutenant who is in love with and dating the swimsuit model from the bar. Her dad still runs the fleet. Oh yeah, Alex might be a captain. Stupid movie has people calling him both. I’m sure this is a joke that I don’t get but that’s kind of a problem, no?

Anyhoo, you write the rest of the script. Make sure the aliens aren’t particularly bright and let an awful lot of obviously military people live after having shown the capacity to kill by the hundreds. Do this to spare our heroes for the sole purpose of making sure this thing stretches to over two hours. Keep your love story mostly centered around Alex being intimidated by his girlfriend’s father. Even though this guy is played by Liam Neeson, don’t use him for anything else. Shoehorn in a few references to the game, including a giant grid, of course. Add in a ton of jokes and one-liners. Pray at least a few of them are funny. In other words, make it exactly like Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, or any of his other movies, for that matter.

Imitating Bay is precisely what director Peter Berg does. However, Joe Q Public isn’t as much a cushion for Battleship to fall back on. Despite the game having been around since World War I, in some form or another, it has nowhere near the nostalgia factor going for it that Transformers does. Dots on a paper or blips on a grid are nowhere near as exciting as giant fighting robots. Besides that, I’m not sure anyone who has played the game could come up with enough of a storyline to justify a movie being made for it. Sadly, neither could the people actually involved in making it. Second, this doesn’t offer the spectacle of said robots transforming. The fact that none of aliens has as much as a personality renders this even more run of the mill. Think about it. We’ve seen scores of alien invasion flicks, but only three Transformers flicks. So far, that is. I hate to sound like I’m defending that franchise because I hate the last two movies it gave us. At least they give us something we’re not really getting anywhere else. Don’t get me wrong. If you’re looking for lots of stuff going boom, there is some enjoyment to be had here. It’s paced quickly enough and the aliens unleash some nasty weaponry. If you want anything deeper than that, move along. Nothing to see here.

MY SCORE: 4/10