A traditional haiku is anchored around the invocation of nature’s most ubiquitous objects and occurrences. Thunder, rain, rocks, waterfalls. In the short poems, the complexity of these images, typically taken for granted, are plumbed for their depth to meditate on the behavior of humanity. Much of the dialogue in Josh C. Waller’s Lone Samurai, heard in Riku’s voiceover (Shogen), are poetic trinkets, while the film at large takes the form of the simplistic image-making that defines the Japanese literary tradition. Despair, grief, resilience, violence, glory, peace. All in a day’s work for a master swordsman.
In the late 13th century, in the aftermath of Kublai Khan’s beating-back by a band of samurai, Riku wakes up on an abandoned shoreline, his leg impaled by a wooden stake. That action is given to us via opening titles, and so our introduction to our intrepid hero is very much through the lens of the film’s literal title. Riku removes the stake as best he can without immediately bleeding out. Carrying around this massive, open wound, he encounters the ghosts of his past on this seemingly deserted land with all of its forests, valleys and crashing waterfalls transforming into a twisted and beautiful funhouse of reverie and horror.
Lone Samurai is, Ironically, Best When Not Focused on the Action.
As Riku traverses this gorgeous but solitary world, he has visions of his children and of his wife, Army (Sumire Ashina) — all of whom are, presumably, lost. Waller’s depiction of Army is exceedingly silly, falling as it does into the trope of Wistful Dead Wife Syndrome that has pervaded so many other action films that belong to the unofficial “Dude’s Rock” genre. But the film stays in its lane for the most part, and, despite this being a film billed as “samurai versus cannibals,” it is actually at its best before the fighting begins.
Twice, Riku is about to commit ritualistic seppuku when he is interrupted. The first, at the sight of a mountain; the second, by a rock to the head. Captured by a cannibalistic, cultish clan, Riku is thrust into a disturbingly violent world that he must escape from. Which, he does, and fairly easily. He’s a samurai, they’re isolated cannibals, it’s not exactly an even match.
The action here is choreographed by some of the same people behind The Raid, and indeed a lot of it is as kinetically charged as those films with a similar, backed-into-the-corner, self-contained thrill. But Weller doesn’t film it all that well, cutting away at inopportune moments that don’t let Shogen’s martial arts ability shine through. And, because Riku so overpowers the opposition, there just isn’t much tension to hold on to.
The film’s most troublesome quality, however, is its implied sociological politics. Considering Japan’s colonial history of Indonesia, it is hard to escape the optics of a civilized Japanese man mowing down scores of barbarian Indonesians. It feels like the clueless choice of a white director on a set occupied by communities he doesn’t belong to, and it casts a dark pallor over the bulk of the film.
Strangely, the film would probably have been best as a sort of Cast Away-style survival film, because as soon as it moves from the exceptional tranquility of the first third to the nauseating violence of the last two thirds, it loses all the majesterial quality it had built up. Like Zatoichi, Lone Samurai succeeds as the story of an untraditional, loyal-to-a-fault warrior, but perhaps Riku needs more meat to chew off next time.