Jûsan-nin no shikaku aka Thirteen Assassins

Director: Eiichi Kudo
Country: Japan
Date: 1963
Runtime: 2 hours
Format: .avi and with .srt English subtitles

Eiichi Kudo isn't exactly a known director, his Wiki page has maybe two sentences and this movie has like three reviews on Imdb. Those two sentences wouldn't even be there if Takashi Miike didn't remake one of his films (this one as it turns out) but that doesn't necessary mean he made bad movies. He's just not that known outside of Japan.

Thirteen Assassins is the first installment of the so called Samurai Revolution trilogy. It's one of those trilogies that aren't really connected by plot but by ideas or concept. The concept here is fighting for justice and telling feudal lords to go fuck themselves. I watched all three of movies and I have to say this is my favorite one. If anyone would like to (really, really) see the other ones I could upload them since they appear so scarce on the web.

The plot itself is pretty basic in structure. There's this colossal douchebag that did some really bad things and a group of people (samurais in this case) decide to do something about it. The plot is actually done really well when you look at its details. There's always something going on and it doesn't really get boring; maybe the plot goes a bit slow (the movie is 2 hours after all) but Japanese movies are kinda like that. Probably the only gripe I had with the characters and with this movie as a whole is that it has too much characters sometimes. You can get lost with all the names, motives and positions if you don't follow real close to what's currently going on and what's being discussed. Despite that it all resolves itself at the end and it's not really that hard to connect the dots. There are a lot of subtle hints and critiques of (then) Japanese society thrown out throughout conversations that are in the movie which I thought was a nice touch.

As far as cinematography goes the movie looks really nice. It was made during the golden era of samurai movies and it really shows in its design, locations and costumes. What I like about this the most is probably that it's far more realistic in its style. There are no one man armies here. Everyone is very human here which is a nice change from the: Mifune's beard kills everything in one hit.

If you're into these kind of movies I highly recommend you watch this, you won't regret it. If you don't like slow, black and white Japanese movies: feel free to pass this up.

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