Reviews

I was surprised how awful this film is. To the point. The first hour there are two fights, all involving Keanu, all with no blood, all against mystique creatures. The dialogue in this film is surprisingly bad. Not just Keanu but the rest of the cast. It would've been better to have everyone speak the language at the time (with Eng subs) maybe have Keanu speak mostly English since he was an outsider. There was no tension whatsoever. The dramatic scenes felt forced. Also, for a film to be so long the first and second acts feel scattered with absolutely no development of the characters. You don't get to know any other Ronin except the guy who dislikes Keanu and the fat Ronin who coincidentally dies in the next scene after he is introduced to the audience.

The film is shot well with beautiful colors but I don't know they tried to make it so epic. If you going to make an epic adventure about a group of people going to battle we at least have some sense of who the group is. We know the seven dwarfs. We know all the Hobbits. In 47 Ronin, the only person we know is Keanu and he isn't even a Ronin.

The love story. Of course it is never explained why the princess is madly in love with Keanu. But what makes it odd is there isn't any competition for her love. Usually in those formulaic films you have the female torn between choosing one guy over another (ie Twilight). I kept thinking what does this love story have to do with 47 Ronin. Overall this film is a bunch of random shots thrown together with cliché dialogue, no blood and some unexplained romance.

Spoiler: I usually don't write reviews but I had to for this one since the critic's were raving about it. My initial thought when first viewing the trailer was negative. Mainly because it's difficult to believe a 60lb girl can kill trained assassins 3 times her size. I didn't see this in the theater I was going to wait till DVD. As it got closer to release I kept seeing this film pop up in conversations and blogs about how good it is.

I'm here to say that my initial impression was spot on. Not only was the story bad but so was some of the technical camera stuff and fight scenes. I'm far from a movie snob that looks for technical issues while viewing a film but some of the things in this movie were so obvious the average viewer can't help but scratch their head at why the director left it as is. A lot of it had to do with editing. One example towards the end Eric Bana's character is running from a skinhead and he has to be at least several yards away. It's your typical chase scene. Then cut to Bana is behind a van waiting to attack the bad guy. It didn't make sense because one minute they're on the street the next they're in an abandoned playground that just happens to have a broken down van. There are quite a few other scenes like that throughout the movie eg fast cuts to random scenes.

The fight scenes should've been better. I was hoping for kick-ass / hitgirl type action. Instead it felt like Bourne Identity. The problem it's hard for the average viewer to suspend their imagination into believing a 13yr girl had go toe to toe / exchange body blows with adult men (who also wear armor). Also, the whole Eric Bana sensei thing doesn't work. If he can train Hanna he should be able to train other people too. Which I'm sure he did when he worked for the gov't. Yet those same trained people can't beat a young girl. Also Hanna goes from killing dozens of people via hand2hand then towards the end she struggles killing three people.

I could go on but I won't waste your time like this movie did mine. If you do decide to rent it, other things that were odd are: weird techno/pop music, Hanna's posture when walking, Hanna is emotionless yet at the end she's an emotional wreck, 13yr old lesbo kiss scene, Kate Blanchett as an army of one that kills everyone, Hanna's obvious stunt double, and the constant running in several directions but going nowhere.

Oh one more thing. Eric Bana taught Hanna how to hunt but he didn't teach her how to survive in the modern world. The majority of assassins in movies nowadays know how to travel the world via fake passports, a cellphone, fake disguises and thievery. For some reason Hanna seems like she was sent from the 1800's. Scared of lights and TV etc and yet in the next scene she is a master of a PC at an internet cafe.

Five weeks later. 48 hours before. Two weeks after. 18 months ago. As someone mentioned previously trying to following the timeline in the first 10mins is impossible. Blair Underwood, POTUS, doesn't show up until the last 10mins of the show. That short few minutes could have been the pilot. That is the only place where some mystery and suspense takes hold. POTUS is mad because CIA is holding aliens captive secretly in a snowy wasteland. The pilot should have started at that point. The 1st 40mins of the pilot were worthless and actually could have been reduced to five mins. By the end you don't care about anyone and the nerdy guy and his girl felt like a different entirely different movie ala DiCaprio's The Beach.