11 Rebels

(十一人の賊軍)

dir: Kazuya Shiraishi

2024

11 Rebels joins the illustrious ranks of Japanese period piece katana wielding action movies where a small number of wonderful people fight a much greater force and somehow come out on top but also all still mostly die by the end.

Why, yes, I am taking the piss, but am I exaggerating? Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is literally about seven guys who fight off 40 or so bandits, and win but mostly die. This flick set the template for so many action flicks for decades to come, not just in Japan, that we’re still suffering for it to this very day. Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, itself a loose remake of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, doubled the number of fighters but multiplied the enemy into the hundreds.

And of course I can’t not mention 47 Ronin, which literally has a bunch of ronin get revenge on a lord who dishonoured them, and once they’ve won their epic battle (after four hours of screen time), they all commit harakiri, which is just insane, the most insane thing that’s ever happened in the history of insane things happening. And Japanese people love that fucking story!

This flick has 11 people forced to fight against their will, or against being immediately executed, with the promise of maybe not being executed later if they survive, which they’re not meant to, and it’s all a lie because the sneaky piece of shit who’s really pulling all of the strings needs everyone to be dead anyway.

Everyone thinks they’re the main character in this flick. All of them with the exclusion of one character, being Mizoguchi (Sadao Abe) are profoundly wrong. The young lord who thinks he runs this province is wrong. The smug generals who lead two competing armies are wrong. The de facto and completely unwilling leader of the 11 rebels doesn’t want to be the main character at all, and he gets his wish. The samurai bullying the rebels into defending a key bridge and a key fortress thinks he’s the main character, because he’s a samurai, but guess what, he’s not right either.

They’re all wrong except for Mizoguchi. This is the era in Japanese history where samurai had to shave the middle bit of their heads, so many of the samurai look, to use the culturally sensitive term, fucking ridiculous. Mizoguchi definitely has that, as well as beady, froglike eyes, and is middle-aged, so he doesn’t lop off a single head or limb. But there is no doubt at all that everything that happens for the next two plus hours is because he wills it to happen.

Look, most of us like to think and act like we have some kind of, some level of autonomy in our lives: We are fucking lying to ourselves. Forces far beyond us can have immense impacts on our daily lives, and I’m not just talking about when Mercury is in retrograde or Venus in Libra. I mean there are people, sometimes awful, sometimes completely unthinking, who say and do things with absolutely no conception of what the repercussions might be, who just do things for the fuck of it, not caring what the impacts will be for countless millions of lives.

Mizoguchi is the puppet master, the string puller, the shot caller who calls all the shots when no one is looking, and the vast majority of the other characters in this flick will never see him, hear from him or ever meet him. And yet, everything he did, 99 per cent of which was to retain power, the rest being for his own survival, impacts more on the ebb and flow of the flick’s plot way beyond what other characters with far more power would ever realise.

It's tricky, really tricky, considering the needle he has to thread. There’s one army that looks like it’s going to be the new ruling power across the land. There’s another army fighting to retain control of Japan. Mizoguchi convinces both of them that he’s on their side so that they don’t attack, but in order to do that he has to convince them someone else holds the fortress next to a bridge which is the only way to some port on the coast.

That’s complicating things; I am overly complicating things. None of the jerks fighting know anything about what’s going on, and are all just grateful to not have been executed yet. Their executions, which was going to be with a comically big saw, would clearly not have been fun. Unlike almost every other one of these kinds of flicks, there is no illusion that anyone, whether samurai, peasant, criminal or otherwise, is acting noble or will ever do anything noble in their lives. A couple of the samurai argue about honour this or duty that, and it’s acknowledged by all and sundry that it’s all a heap of bullshit. This may be a period piece, but it’s an ugly, gruesome one.

We know, right from the start, like Masa (Takayuki Yamada, who also played a major role in 13 Assassins) does, that the samurai ain’t shit. He’s only here because a samurai thought it would be perfectly fine if he sexually assaulted some peasant woman. And given the social terms of these class structures, the samurai was absolutely right, and was never even going to have to apologise, let alone face any repercussions for his despicable actions. Masa says “fuck that and you” and goes and kills the guy who hurt his wife, knowing full well he would most likely never see her or anyone else he might care about ever again.

He may appreciate that this opportunity has extended his life temporarily, but he has no illusions that samurai are men of their word. And he’s not the “I’d love to die for my Shogun and country” type of guy. None of them are. None of these despicable crims (most of whom didn’t do that much wrong to justify their incarceration or their executions, but some did some awful stuff) are motivated by anything abstract; nothing beyond their basic survival.

Flicks like this often go to the trouble of getting you to care about some of the characters, and I guess they do that here too, but I can’t say that I really cared that much about their motivations or their backstories. It’s not that I wanted them to die; it’s that I knew with an absolute certainty that they were all going to die (with the possible exception of a female character and a child-like disabled character who calls our main rebel “big brother”, but not in an Orwellian sense). I have long joked about the death fetishism at the core of a lot of Japanese traditional art, especially movies, and this flick follows the pattern exactly, with a few notable exceptions.

There’s a long, drawn out scene (in a good way), where it looks like Mizoguchi has royally fucked up, back at the palace, and that he’s going to be compelled to commit ritual suicide. The longer it went on, the more convinced I was that it would never happen, because he was, like I believed, the secret main character. But on the other hand I’ve seen versions of these kinds of stories where someone commits harakiri just for having looked at someone funny, or for having one eyebrow thicker than the other, and with life being cheap, hell, everyone can die in these flicks. No one is safe, least of all anyone around the “good” guys.

There’s the giant one who gets no dialogue but who loves killing samurai. There’s the old guy who everyone thinks is too old to be any good at anything, but he’s like a master swordsman; there’s the simpleton, but he’s adept at explosives; there’s the slick cheater at dice, but he’s good for nothing except looking mighty handsome and wearing a prototypical fedora; there’s a priest who does little more than pray for the dead, and that’s all he does, so maybe he’ll squeak through?

Not everyone gets their moment to shine, but they are all just pawns in a game way bigger than themselves, even when they have no idea what’s really going on. The fighting and action are well handled, with the katana fights being handled in a grounded (I hesitate to say ‘realistic’) way, whereas a lot of the broader “war” stuff is perhaps on a bigger budget, but a lot of the time it has a bit of a made-for-tv feel.

It is way too long. I know the granddaddy of this genre is over three hours long, but this didn’t need to be over two and a half hours. There’s not enough story to justify it. They could have cut out a few of the “the handsome rebels did what?” or “this time we really have to get them” scenes, and it wouldn’t have suffered. They are all, we are all, after all, just racing towards our pauper’s graves.

11 Rebels is another entry in a storied and entertaining field with many, many other films in it. I don’t know if it does enough to distinguish itself, or to set itself apart, because it’s ultimately a fairly conservative entry in a fairly conservative field. But it was entertaining enough, especially during the fight scenes. And I never like watching people die (except when they really, really deserve it).

It’s brutal, ferocious, ugly and mean, just like all war films should be. War is, after all, hell.

7 times shiny katanas are not the only method of murderising people out of 10

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“I am not dying here today.” – so you say, buddy, but you clearly haven’t chatted with the producers lately - 11 Rebels