My LAST SAMURAI review.

Tom Cruise goes all superhero samurai.
Reviewer: rileymccarthy from Atlanta, GA USA

My favorite moments in THE LAST SAMURAI happened after Tom Cruise's integration into the samurai society. Faced with a fight, he closes his eyes and plays what he feels is going to happen in his head. Then, his Spidey-samurai senses in flux, he proceeds to slice and dice his enemies. The whole thing struck me as, to be honest, sorta amusing.

I mean, Tom Cruise's character, Nathan Allgren, is abducted by the ancient warriors early in the film, then he spends three to six months with them, first as their enemy and then as their friend. He's living in the house of a man he killed, tended to by that man's widow. The man's children, all rather understanding about their father's death being part of "samurai duty," start playing with the American, thinking him a pretty cool guy. And, while all this is happening, Nathan Allgren becomes a FEARSOME SAMURAI WARRIOR. And, eventually, he's able to battle alongside the samurai general against a band of the emperor's invading ninjas. All this in less than six months!

That said, THE LAST SAMURAI is an entertaining, beautiful-looking film. Tom Cruise's character, who alternates between being a rude, drunken Civil War soldier and the sort of man who writes that he's "beset by the irony of his life" in his journals, is hard to pin down. But the supporting actors, particularly Ken Watanabe as the samurai general Katsumoto, are uniformly terrific in it, and they make Cruise look better and less wooden in each progressing scene.

The film even, for the most part, escapes being a cliche about the white hero coming in and saving "savage, foreign" warriors from themselves.

The ending is a letdown, sadly. This film would clearly work best as a tragedy, yet the filmmakers, for some reason, tack on a happy-ish ending to the film. By not daring to bring the story to its more obvious yet ultimately dark conclusion, the filmmakers instead give us a film that is less than great.

But it's fun, for the most part. It's not going to win an Oscar, except maybe for Watanabe's supporting work, but it's a fun film.