Is 13 Assassins worth watching? The last 45 minutes are one continuous battle

Takashi Miike had directed more than eighty films before this one, most of them fast, cheap and extremely strange. This is the one he made properly.

13 Assassins is a 2010 remake of Eiichi Kudo's 1963 film of the same name, written by Daisuke Tengan and set in 1844, in the last decades of the Tokugawa shogunate. Lord Matsudaira Naritsugu (Gorō Inagaki) is the shogun's half-brother, protected by rank, and about to be appointed to the shogunate council. He is also a sadist, and the film establishes this in a first act that is deliberately hard to sit through — a ritual suicide in the opening minutes, a family murdered for sport, a surviving witness with her limbs and tongue removed. Shinzaemon Shimada (Kōji Yakusho) is quietly handed the job of killing him.

The hour before anything happens

Shinzaemon recruits twelve men, one at a time, and the recruitment is the point. Nobody gets a rousing speech. They are assembled on the understanding that they will die, and most of them treat that as the first interesting thing to happen to them in a generation of peace.

The thirteenth is not a samurai at all. Kiga Koyata (Yūsuke Iseya) is a hunter they pick up in the mountains, and he spends the film refusing to behave like anyone else in it.

The plan is architectural. They buy the village of Ochiai for 200 ryo and rebuild it: barricades, funnels, trip mechanisms, explosives, a street with no exits. Then they wait for an escort they expect to number seventy. It arrives with more than two hundred.

Read more: 13 Assassins: who is the 13th assassin? Not a samurai — and, by the ending, possibly not even mortal

Forty-five minutes, one location

The battle runs roughly three-quarters of an hour and does not leave the village. Miike shot it over about three weeks in Tsuruoka, Yamagata, in mid-2009, and took two decisions that carry the whole sequence: almost no storyboarding, and almost no CGI. The mud, the rain, the flaming bullocks and the exhaustion are real and they accumulate.

"A riveting, ingeniously plotted" climax that "few contemporary Japanese directors besides Miike could pull off," wrote Miike's biographer Tom Mes in 2011.

What makes it hold is that the trap degrades. The clever devices are used up in the first ten minutes, the numbers grind the plan down, and by the end the survivors are fighting with broken swords in a street they built themselves.

Roger Ebert called it "terrifically entertaining, an ambitious big-budget epic, directed with great visuals and sound," and put it on his best films of 2011.

Which version you're watching

There are two cuts, and the difference is front-loaded:

• The Japanese cut, 141 minutes — the full version, with more of the recruitment and more of Naritsugu's household.
• The international cut, 125 minutes — the one Magnet released in North America on 29 April 2011; it trims the first act, not the battle.
• Either way the battle is intact — nothing was cut from the last three-quarters of an hour.

Is it worth it

On the numbers, yes: 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from a 7.9 average, 84 on Metacritic, four Japan Academy Prizes including cinematography and art direction, a place on the BFI's ten great samurai films, and $17.5 million worldwide against a $6 million budget after a competition premiere at Venice on 9 September 2010.

The honest caveat is the first twenty minutes, which exist to make you want the rest of the film to happen and are unpleasant on purpose. If you can get past them, this is the most straightforwardly satisfying thing Miike has made.

For the record: the closing text notes that Naritsugu's death was officially recorded as illness. The shogunate he was about to help run lasted another twenty-three years.

Read more: The 13 Assassins villain: why Takashi Miike handed the role to a J-pop idol