For the most part, Takashi Miike is a director best known to western audiences for his unsettling suspense/horror pictures such as Audition or hard-boiled Yakuza films like Dead or Alive. However, over his twenty year long career, Miike has shown himself to be able to create compelling movies in almost any genre, even with kid-centric films, as evidenced by 2005's The Great Yokai War. Miike's latest movie, 13 Assassins, shows that he's also able to work deftly in the realm of swordplay epics as well.

The film is a remake of a 1963 Eiichi Kudo picture, and is based around actual historical events. In 1835, the feudal period in Japan was coming to an end. The values of the samurai, and thus the control they had over the general populace, were deteriorating, as evidenced by the actions of Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira (Goro Inagaki), who uses his high position to wantonly commit atrocities on the people he is supposed to be protecting. This causes the shogun warlords to tap the veteran samurai Shinzaemon Shimada (Koji Yakusho) to take out Naritsugu by any means necessary.

The first two-thirds of 13 Assassins details how Shinzaemon assembles his rag-tag team of thirteen, which is eventually set up against Naritsugu's army of two hundred in the confines of a small village. This climatic battle is definitely the meat and potatoes of 13 Assassins. While the rest of the film takes a typically Japanese slow burn, the last forty-five minutes in which the confrontation occurs is unabashedly balls-to-the-wall in its' nearly gleeful portrayal of graphic violence. Unfortunately, much of the footage here is shot too closely and edited too fast, which leads to the power of the scenes being diminished somewhat.

Yes, it can be said that Miike (and his action director, Keiji Tsujii) were trying to capture the claustrophobic nature of close-quarters combat. But one would think that a versatile and experienced director such as Miike could find a more palatable way to portray the action of swordfights versus simply placing the camera a couple of feet away from the combatants. Combined with an ending that features the seeming resurrection of a character shortly before shown to be killed -- though one could argue that the character was actually a ghost, this actually opens a whole new can of worms -- it could be said that 13 Assassins has been over-rated by many critics.

That is, if the movie wasn't so damn good in every other respect. Miike's deft touch makes anticipating and then seeing the fate of even the most minor characters compelling material and, as such, the viewer will still be glued to the screen until the end credits roll, despite any qualms they may or may not have about have the swordplay is handled. From beginning to end, this is a motion picture that was obviously crafted with a great amount of love for both the story and the genre as a whole. In a sea of junky martial arts movies from all corners of the world, 13 Assassins stands out as one of the increasingly rare entries in this day and age of Xeroxed cookie-cutter formulaic fare that actually raises the bar for the audience instead of simply pandering to their lowest common denominator.

RATING: 8