Starring: Tom Cruise, Ken Watanabe (I), Billy Connolly

7 out of 10

The Last Samurai has a ludicrous first twenty minutes and a tepid, confounding last fifteen minutes, but in between these disappointing bookends the film is as involving, compelling, and dare I say, epic, as any seen this year…and I don't care for Tom Cruise.

Cruise plays Nathan Algren, a man who is a veteran of the Civil War and the Indian wars in the West. He and his pal, Gant (Billy Connolly), are part of the 7th Calvary and must have been on leave when Custer was trounced at Little Big Horn. The year is 1876 (sometime after Custer's June defeat in the Montana territory, we're led to believe) and Algren spends most of his days in a drunken haze, hawking Winchester rifles and enduring flashbacks of Indian slaughters he had a hand in. He's approached by an old commanding officer, Col. Bagley (Tony Goldwyn), who asks him to help train the newly-formed army of the Japanese Emperor to use the long-range rifle, and he agrees. The troops, though green, are forced into battle against the feudal warlords, the samurai, and are promptly mowed down by the warriors with their conventional weapons. Algren's fighting tenacity is admired by Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), the leader of the samurai. Katsumoto wants to understand his adversary better and so he takes the American prisoner and brings him to their village, high in the hills. Algren begins to not only understand his captors, but to sympathize with them, and take up Katsumoto's cause, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

Director Ed Zwick faces overwhelming odds at first, as well. Samurai starts out leaden and as fakey as Algren's San-Fran-to-Japan green-screened ocean crossing (with a map superimposed, just in case you weren't sure just where Algren is going!). Cruise stands in front of the fake sunset with fake wind blowing in his hair. It's the nadir of the film. Zwick picks things up once the Samurai appear. It seems to be what interests him most, and he conjures up -- mostly in the person of Katsumoto -- the best of the Samurai genre, including The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and the Zatoichi series. There is more than a little difficulty accepting the plot contrivance that Algren is billeted in the house of one of the Samurai he killed in the first battle, and that this man's children (let alone his wife) don't resent this foreigner to the point of murder. Though Zwick attempts to explain this as an estrangement of cultures, he never sells it. What he sells like hotcakes, however, are the battle sequences, particularly a visceral scene with ninja assassins (yup, ninja assassins). It's the exact type of moment that Quentin Tarantino tried mightily, but failed utterly to create in Kill Bill Vol. 1. Zwick is on track to be making another Glory, until something derails him.

"I am beset by the ironies of my life" says Algren, early on. Cruise could make the same statement, as he both makes and mars the picture. A film on this scale, with this cost, could not be made without Cruise. But Samurai's successes aren't only tied to the actor's power, box-office draw, or his seeming single-mindedness. Algren's transformation in the village, where the movie finds its feet, are deeply tied to our desire (okay, maybe my desire) to see Tom Cruise knocked down a peg or two. And, like the man Algren is supposed to be, there is a rising sense of pride watching a man stoically take denigration with steadfastness and courage. Cruise is responsible for that.

But the failings of the bookends, the opening and ending, seem distinctly tied to his persona, or our perception of it. First off, Cruise is about as believable as a drunken reprobate as Nicole Kidman was as a white-trash janitor in The Human Stain. He blasts his lines and slurs his speech just the way someone would who was thinking of the actions of a drunk.

He plays off of people and situations well, as he always has. Where he has never succeeded is when the camera is solely trained on him. He always has the patented Cruise "I just stubbed my toe real bad" breath-holding, vein-popping scenes that seem to be his way of conveying great pain and anguish, but just seem to register as a lack of oxygen.

Then, there's the ending, (which I won't give away) which for no reason at all veers away from the course that the entire movie has convinced us it is taking. Okay, damn, I will give it away -- Spoiler Alert!! End of Movie Revealed Here:

Nathan Algren, beyond any possible believable explanation, survives the final climactic battle. He shouldn't. His bond with Katsumoto has regained him his honor, he has found a bond again with humanity, and we've been told repeatedly that the final battle against the Emperor's men is a lost cause -- Nathan Algren should die. He doesn't, and we're subjected to a tacked-on ending seemingly pulled from nowhere, where a voice-over informs us that no one knew the fate of "the soldier" but that it was rumored that he spent the rest of his days in peace in the mountains.

Sorry Tom, that's just wrong.