Movies That Kick Ass: 13 Assassins

 To sum it up quite simply: 13 Assassins is a movie that manages to combine excellent character drama with batshit insanity. Its filled to the brim with conflicts over honor, duty, loyalty and the nature of oaths. Also, it has enough dead bodies to a fill an Olympic sized swimming pool and more spike traps than a Dungeon Masters Guide.

Indeed they are.

The story begins with a house elder committing Sepuku in protest against Lord Naritsugu. Lord Naritsugu is basically evil incarnate but is protected because he's the half brother of the shogun. This allows him to get away with extreme acts of over the top villainy in every scene he's in without even slowing down once. This is a man who will go from zero to rape in 1.5 seconds, then mock the husband of the rape victim, then kill him while he tries to console his wife, behead his dead body, then insult his dead body to his wife's face.

I'm not a rape expert but I think this is considered a definite Faux Pas

And that's just what he does to warm up.

We follow Sir Doi as he ponders just what to do about Lord Dickhead. The guy is bad enough on a day to day basis (What with all the atrocities) but the shogun is about to elevate him to a senior position in which he'll have actual power over the whole of Japan, which terrifies the shit out of everyone. Sir Doi decides that the little shit simply must die. To do this, he goes to the Samurai Shinzaemon and tells him that he wants him to kill Lord Dickhead before he can ascend to a position in the government. To reinforce how much this man must die, he shows Shinzaemon the good lord's handiwork: The daughter of a peasant leader who rebelled because Naritsugu taxed his subjects so much they could barely afford their own food.

Oh god what.

Yeah, Naritsugu kinda made her into a human sex toy by cutting off all her limbs so she'd fit in a travelling case and removed her tongue so he wouldn't have to listen to her. That's pro level evil, not your amateur stuff you often see. As the finishing touch, he leaves her to die face down in the street in the rain rather than giving her any kind of merciful death. Because he was bored.

Shinzaemon asks what happened to her family and she answers using a brush in her mouth while bleeding from her eyes because of how much trauma she's sustained.

Shinzaemon in seeing this absolutely gut punching display has about the reaction to this much human misery and evil that you would expect.

"Yeeesss"

Or shit, he's overjoyed that this level of evil exists.  See, Shinzaemon wants a meaningful death but that's basically impossible in the era he lives in. Lord Dickhead gives him the perfect opportunity to die an honorable death against not only superior odds but in a mission to kill someone who is basically pure evil. We then get to meet Shinzaemons opposite number, the Samurai Hanbei as Lord Dickhead is casually practicing his archery.

Magnitude 8.3 on the Dickter Scale

...on the family of the clan leader who comitted suicide as protest to Naritsugu's wanton brutality....

Hanbei is basically a slave to the oaths of loyalty he has to Naritsugu and when he tries to get Naritsugu to stop trying to finish off the entire family, Lord Dickhead throws it back in his face saying that Samurai must obey their lord even to the point of dying for them. This sets up the central conflict between Shinzaemon and Hanbei and their different ideas of honor. Hanbei's loyalty is to a Lord, Shinzaemon believes that a lord must earn loyalty. Both men know that they will be fighting over the life of Naritsugu as he travels back to his home territory the capital.

We get to meet 11 of the other assassins, which includes Shinzaemons nephew Shinrokurō who is bored of the samurai life and has taken up gambling. We learn that Shinzaemon is a highly skilled gambler in both games and life. He always takes the long shot bet and that's what he plans to do against Naritsugu. His plan is to politically block his path, forcing him through a specific town that they plan to buy out and fortify. So they set off and pick up a bizarre hunter named Kiga Koyota.

Naritsugu and Hanbei meanwhile find their path politically blocked by a local lord whose Son Naritsugu beheaded earlier. Naritsugu is so arrogant he almost gets his face shot off right there for trying to force the blockade single handidly.

I'm pretty sure you'd need a silver bullet or a piece of the true cross anyway.

Hanbei says that his lord can endure a little humiliation if it means maintaining his safety since in a year he will be second in command of the country. Naritsugu has him utterly pegged psychologically though and uses his strict codes of honor against him to get him to do whatever the fuck he wants.

Meanwhile, Shinzaemon is fortifying the heck out of a town and turning it into a trap. They know it's a gamble because Naritsugu has over 200 samurai as escorts, but to them killing him is the only honorable thing to do. A conflict is utterly unavoidable at this point and you look at the time as the final battle begins.

Holy. Shit.

There ain't any excessive denouement either, the rest of the movie is all battle.

So the assassins have fortified their town into a total death trap and left a token group of civilians behind to maintain appearances when Hanbei scouts it. As he's escorting his lord through the town, he sees the villagers escaping into the forest and sees swords\arrows placed in strategic locations and realizes that he's been led into a trap.

Its at this point that the movie loses its fucking mind. Maybe you realize that when the so foot high spring loaded spiked walls slide in, maybe you realize that when they unleash flaming livestock on them.

Hope you like your steaks rare and angry

But no matter what point you realize it, this movie just became utterly over the top.

Shinzaemon traps them in the town via a series of spiked walls (complete with land mines) while simultaneously blowing up the only bridge out of town. All the buildings have been filled with spikes so they can't get through them and there's catwalks up top so the Assassins can get around with ease. The entire town is now a D&D death trap and Shinzaemon and co give them a proper greeting, informing them they're about to get fucking arrowed.

Its basically the Edo equivalent of the shower scene as the assassins shoot arrows by the dozens into the samurai bodyguards while wild man Kiga just hurls gigantic rocks at everyone with his sling. The bodyguards find that any possible way out is generally a trap and generally quite explosive, bringing entire buildings down on their heads. After this onslaught, Shinzaemon declares that they should end these "petty tricks" and get down to business.

He then officially declares his intentions.

Now, they've got the high ground and prepared defenses. So logically, they should man those and cut the lesser samurai to pieces as they try to climb out of the trap. They still have explosives and arrows to flush them out, so we should see a highly tactical battle in which-

"BANZAI MOTHERFUCKERS!"

Or they all jump into heaping crowds of mooks to mix it the fuck up. From here on out, this is going to be a battle god damn royale. There's so much action and so many great moments that from here I can only give you the highlights. Basically all the bodyguards are utterly inexperienced because it's a time of relative peace and are absolutely terrified of these mad men who have trapped them in the Edo Tomb of Horrors while the Assassins are humanoid typhoons because of either superior training, actual field experience, willingness to throw out any notion of a fair fight or in the case of Kiga: Pure street rat crazy.

This guy must smell amazing

The bodyguards find that no matter which way they attempt to turn to escape from this onslaught of Samurai and Crazy Guy with Rock. Often though, Lord Dickhead will actually run off in directions that he knows are going to be traps because he's actually that much of a dickhead and is having a great time watching all his men die trying to save him from the ambushes.

This is not even remotely a fair fight

Hanbei has to keep running around and coming to his rescue, since he's the only Samurai on his side who's worth a damn. He's having to bust his way through spring loaded falling spike walls to stand in front of a guy who is actively putting himself into danger all the time. This is a guy who can deflect arrows off hand with his sword and make stone cold killers back the fuck off.

The dreaded Jazz Hands defense.

Meanwhile, all the Samurai who aren't Hanbei are getting slaughtered with swords, spears, fire, explosives and large rocks but they begin to wear the assassins down. While they're an absolute wrecking crew, it seems they didn't do enough endurance training in the off season and its starting to cost them. One by one, sheer numbers start taking their toll and they start dying against the samurai bodyguards. Several are dramatically run through, others start collapsing dead from sheer blood loss from all the little lucky hits that made it through. One takes his own life with the gunpowder he was carrying, taking another man with him.

Fact: The human body contains two hundred and fifty gallons of blood.

While Hanbei keeps trying to reassure his men that they totally have this thing won if they just stay focused, Lord Naritsugu tells him that he finds this whole conflict amazing and they should totally usher in an age of non-stop war when he's raised to second in command. Hanbei is absolutely horrified by this but is stupidly loyal so he says nothing even though he's past the point that most people would go "Fuck it, you can have him".

Both sides start running out of Samurai due to various slashing related incidents, with Hanbei and a couple men left defending the lord as they manage to finally escape the town but find Shinzaemon and his nephew waiting for them. Shinzaemon tries to convince Hanbei to leave the gigantic dickhead to die but Hanbei, while acknowledging his Lord's dickhead status, swears that whatever else happens, he is a Samurai who will obey and die. The two men prepare for a duel and Shinzaemon comments that Hanbei was always his superior in the dojo but this is a real fight before promptly kicking a shitload of mud into Hanbei's face and cutting him down with ease.

So of course Lord Dickhead just casually kicks his head around.

This guy has truly raised the fucking bar

Shinzaemon tells Naritsugu that his life ends here because of all his atrocities but Naritsugu amazingly thinks that he has a chance against a stone cold motherfucker like Shinzaemon, who even lets him get a free shot in between insults (Since he wants to die) before cherry tapping him with his sword. Naritsugu dies after blubbering in the mud begging for someone to save him from the pain while Shinzaemon just looks on Like a Boss before beheading him. Shinzaemon dies of his basically self inflicted wound. The only survivors of the battle are his nephew and Kiga who apparantly possesses a Demon Healing Factor that will never be properly explained to anyone who is not Japanese. 

Walk it off pansy!

The end credits helpfully inform us that Lord Naritsugu was reported to have died from a fever, which requires a bit more explanation than one of the characters being a Japanese Demon. 

13 Assassins is an incredibly entertaining movie, both as a drama and as an action movie. I've done it very little justice with this skimmed over account since as mentioned previously, the final battle is a whopping 40 minutes long and not a single minute of that is wasted. Its a marathon of action that doesn't get old no matter how many guys you see cut apart. So go check it out from a library, Netflix it or buy it from Amazon for the sake of shameless internet writers who could use a buck or two to pay for Netflix.