Best Keanu: “Ghosts. Spirits of the old and infirm who are left here to die. Unwanted children too.”

If I have one complaint about 47 Ronin, it’s that there aren’t enough ghosts, too little time spent in the Tengu forest. The film’s supernatural elements are more pronounced in the film’s second half, but underused. I would gladly have taken an extra 30 minutes — bringing the total run time to 2.5 hours — interspersed throughout the film that delved more deeply into the otherworldly underpinnings of the story.

And, perhaps, that was the intent at one time. Because 47 Ronin is one of those films that apparently was mired with production controversies and reshoots and blah blah blah. The good news is that the resulting movie isn’t as choppy as it could have been. For my taste it moved slowly through the first 45 minutes, before finally making good on the promise of action and adventure for the remainder. But still, there’s a whole back story that could have been explored, not just the 47 Ronin themselves but Kai, having been raised by supernatural creatures. There’s just one scene that explores this, and it barely does that aspect of the story justice.

Keanu Reeves plays Kai, and he’s pretty well perfectly cast. Of course, he’s not half-Japanese, but in all other ways he seems almost ideally suited to the role. He’s the outcast, the fighter, and man pretty well resigned to his circumstances. He speaks little, but has plenty of opportunity to do eye acting, which is often all movies require of Keanu. A little bit of eye acting. A little bit of hand-to-hand combat. There are some quasi-love scenes in 47 Ronin as well, but they seem a little unnecessary — or perhaps just sufficient enough to support the idea that the reason Kai agrees to team up with his old rivals is to save a woman he loves.

There’s a beautiful scene near the very end of the film, and it involves seppuku, or ritualistic suicide. It seems strange to say a scene involving suicide is “beautiful,” but it’s clearly shot in a way to be just that. The 47 Ronin are all dressed in white, on a clear day under cherry blossom trees. I can’t judge the historical accuracy of any part of this film, but it made me think about tradition and how deeply some may have held the idea of honour. When Kai, knowing he’s going to engage in seppuku, tells his love Mika that he will search through worlds and lifetimes for her, it made me think of what exists beyond this life. Maybe we are in constant search for our loves, maybe in the past we’ve died for honour, and in an honourable way. Maybe there are supernatural creatures that live in the forest, where unwanted children go.

June 2022