47 Ronin

Though hardly an all-out disaster, 47 Ronin suffers from a death of compelling attributes that ensures it remains, for the majority of its overlong running time, an utterly, hopelessly bland experience – with the movie’s failure especially disappointing given the considerable talent on both sides of the camera. The routine (and predictable) storyline, which follows a group of disgraced samurai (including Hiroyuki Sanada’s Ôishi and Keanu Reeves’ Kai) as they set out to overthrow a ruthless warrior (Tadanobu Asano’s Lord Kira), unfolds at an impossibly deliberate pace that’s especially problematic during the uneventful opening hour, as scripters Chris Morgan and Hossein Amini’s struggle to provide an entry point prevents the viewer from connecting to either the material or the characters – with, in terms of the latter, the Japanese actors’ obvious discomfort with their English-language dialogue resulting in a series of stiff, stilted performances (ie only Sanada is able to make anything resembling a positive impact). The shift into the movie’s episodic midsection certainly doesn’t help matters, as it becomes more and more difficult to work up any enthusiasm for or interest in the title group’s ongoing exploits. (There is, having said that, one decent sequence revolving around the heroes’ efforts at procuring swords, but that’s a rare exception to the film’s otherwise uninvolving vibe.) 47 Ronin‘s perpetually middling atmosphere paves the way for a thoroughly underwhelming climax, with the ineffectiveness of this stretch compounded by director Carl Rinsch’s decision to bathe it darkness – which, in the end, stands emblematic of the film’s pervasive inability to establish itself as anything more than a barely-passable big-budget misfire.

** out of ****