Review of 47 Ronin (1994) by Matt H — 09 Jul 2014

A truly awful movie. It must have been written by a ten year old who watched one samurai movie and wanted to do that. I can't even consider this a Japanese samurai movie; the movie universe seems to know absolutely nothing about Japanese culture or history.

The movie contains the unhonourable trifecta of terrible line delivery/acting, terrible dialogue, and terrible direction of actors' line delivery. I can't tell which is the worst; the directing, the writing, or the acting.

Although the acting is all around anysmal, I think it's the least responsible for this movie being terrible. The dialogue is as I already said terrible, the characterizations are very shallow and cliche ridden, the story is pedestrian at best, and the fantasy/magical elements totally took me out of the movie and made it laughable.

The direction is almost just as terrible; seriously, it looks like the whole movie was shot by the 2nd or 3rd units. For being such an expensive movie, most of the film looks super cheap. The direction is also at least partly to blame for the awful line readings of the actors, besides maybe Keanu Reeves.

And I don't say Keanu is excluded because he gave a good performance; instead he was miscast in having a character that was required to show emotion. Keanu is likeable in a very thin range of roles, and this doesn't happen to be one he was suited for.

He emotes as terribly as pretty much every actor in the movie. But again I partly forgive the cast for clearly having terrible direction and laughable dialogue few actors could chew effectively. Seriously, what were both the studios and the creative team thinking on this one? Yikes.