The rousing action epic may seem, in the age of bloated superhero flicks and video game adaptations, a thing of cinema’s past. If, for example, 2000’s Gladiator sought to revive it in the West, it was a pretty brief revival indeed — certainly not long enough to make a similar-sized hit out of last year’s sequel. And with 11 Rebels, it really is a thing of the past: screenwriter Kasahara Kazuo’s script is over 60 years old, now finally realized on screen by director Shiraishi Kazuya. Set during the Japanese Boshin War of 1868-69, 11 Rebels is a resolutely old-fashioned tale of courage and sacrifice, in keeping with much of Kasahara’s other work, albeit rendered here with all the modern trappings. A thing of the present, then, though it might have been better off left in the past.
The plot, which is twistier and of far greater interest than Shiraishi shows in it, essentially concerns a group of samurai from the Shibata clan and their prisoners, dispatched purportedly to defend a small but vital fort from Imperial troops, seemingly to the benefit of the alliance of clans of which Shibata may or may not be a part. The clan’s ruler is young, dismissive of his advisors, and sympathetic to the Imperial side; the alliance is willing to use whatever means necessary to bring them in line; the prisoners, recruited against their will, face all manner of punishment (including execution) if they refuse to join the mission, and, once they do, have as little loyalty to their cause or to one another as they have combat experience.
It’s a fascinating mess of conflicting interests, full of deception and misdirection, yet it’s not depicted with anything even resembling fascination. Shiraishi swiftly skims over the politics of his premise, furnishing the film’s several action scenes with the majority of his time and attention. Characters are strictly one-dimensional, even amid and after certain shocking revelations or surprising turns of events, and are barely developed in ways that tend to impart the most, such as through honest, meaningful interactions or their engagement with narrative mechanics. Perhaps Kasahara has written them as simple stereotypes, but Shiraishi treats them as such, their value broadly only measured in their involvement in the fighting sequences. And those narrative mechanics are confined almost exclusively to the opening 15 minutes and a single scene midway through — the film’s strongest, despite the brevity with which it dispenses a substantial amount of exposition. With so little depth, and so little purpose beyond their function as, basically, action figures, it’s tough to arouse much concern for these people when the action inevitably arrives.
Shiraishi’s not a bad director of action, thankfully, though he’s not an especially imaginative one either. 11 Rebels is distinguished throughout by its unwavering familiarity of creative choices, not so much handsome in a traditional sense as it is distinctly pedestrian. It’s the same shots from the same perspectives, the same fight choreography in the same style, in the tone you expect and with the outcomes you expect. For want of a better term, it’s all incredibly basic. And things aren’t at all helped by a musical score courtesy of Kenta Matsumura — simplistic and wholly unoriginal, there’s not a bar in it that doesn’t sound like stock music, and it genuinely drags the film down. Something is needed to enliven this whole mundane affair, and even the film’s soundtrack — an element so reliably used as a rousing cheat code elsewhere — fails to deliver.
It’s quite the disappointment to witness a project so long in its journey to the screen, with so much potential, and from such an iconic screenwriter, reach said screen in such uninspired fashion. The Boshin War is an era of Japanese history ripe for narrative exploration, and Kasahara’s story is patently cinematic. One can easily conceive of it making terrific entertainment under the guidance of his Battles Without Honour and Humanity director, Fukasaku Kinji, but 11 Rebels is mere mediocre entertainment at best, banal and disposable, and sadly far from worth the 60-year wait. There’s undoubtedly space for the rousing action epic to find purchase, once again, as a thing of cinema’s present, but it must be a good thing, and 11 Rebels isn’t that.
DIRECTOR: Kazuya Shiraishi; CAST: Takayuki Yamada, Taiga Nakano, Ukon Onoe, Riho Sayashi; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; IN THEATERS: June 10; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 3 min.
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