Deviation Actions
Review Date: 10/10/14
Well this was certainly something strange.
47 Ronin, more commonly known as The Biggest Box Office Bomb of 2013, is a film that so desprately reached for the skies, only to burn up and plummet in utter failure.
Keanu Reeves' acting is awful, with no vigor or investment at all. Instead, he just kind of shuffles through the film in a dreary shamble, never giving any real emotion to anything.
Everybody else takes the bad film FAR too seriously, with a vertible who's-who of Japanese actors really trying to give a good performance that is just smothered by the sheer blandness of the final product.
The VFX are actually pretty good though, if totally waisted. Rinko Kikuchi turns in a very manic performance as the strange shapeshifting witch however, and if this had more performances like that, it might have been able to turn into some sort of Street Fighter ish affair.
In the end however, the film is a bore, and a sordid waste of a Japanese legend.
I say skip it.
Of course, I can't review it without mentioning that, the director had intended this to be similar to Kingdom of Heaven or Gladiator, i.e. a straight historical drama set in Japan. The studio however, wanted Lord of the Rings meets Harry Potter, and basically took the film away from the first-time director, reshooting and editing it to suit their vision....which was a failure.