A man sits with an intense look on his face, gazing out into the setting sun. He hears the roar of a tiger, and an emotional memory breaks in of a tiger fighting for its life as samurais finish it off. But the tiger, with a fierce soul, manages to hold them at bay while still wounded. “Wait a minute,” you may be saying, “Willbo, that’s a shitty way to start a review!” Hey, you’re right! But there’s more! Its an even shittier way to start a movie. Wait, how about this. Two hobbits sit around eating bread. No, that’s no good either. Well, The Last Samurai and Return of the King both don’t start well. And in case you’re a fucking nutcase, its pretty apparent I’m not a huge fan of either. Why, you may ask? Well, I’m going to prove to you, without a doubt, that both of these movies suck ass, and if you still disagree, take heart that at least nobody will miss you when you’re dead so you can go ahead and eat a train.
The Last Samurai, after the fucking pointless and stupid introduction, begins with Tom Cruise being drunk, which he does for about half the movie. While he’s trying really hard to act well, the fact is that I keep expecting Highway to the Danger Zone to blast in. Tommy Boy just can’t get rid of that cocky-young-pretty-boy act that worked pretty well for Top Gun (shitty) and A Few Good Men. Guess what? Tom Cruise isn’t young or a pretty boy anymore. Anyway he gets offered a job to kill Japanese people. Yay. But before they go to Japan, they introduce this character:
The Scotsman. Apparently they’re old war buddies, but that’s not really an excuse because I hate the Scotsman so fucking much. Also Tommy Boy hates some other officer because he made him kill some innocent Native Americans or something. That’s not really important, seeing as it exists as a subplot to give Tom to hate something. Great.
AYE LADDY! AYE LADDY! I LIKE ALE! UP IN THE MOORS, LADDY! AYE LADDY! AYE! AYE! I LIKE BEEF AND SCOTISH WOMEN! AYE AYE!
Alright, that’s pretty much all that happens before Tom goes into battle with his incompetent troops and gets his shit stomped by the samurai in a forest of mist. This part is awesome, though, for one reason: Scotsman gets a spear thrown into his shoulder. After collapsing into the pathetic heap of man that he is, this samurai walks up to him while he’s wounded and shoves a sword into his gut. YES. The twenty minutes of the Scotsman was enough to scar me for life, but at least now he’s dead. So I was happy for about three seconds before it was ruined again.
Tom Cruise kicks ass. An unprecedented amount of ass, in fact. SOMEHOW he’s able to beat a bunch of people with swords and spears made for combat with a shitty saber, which is more or less a war decoration. He kills like eight people. Then, after getting knocked off his horse, a guy runs by and tries to run him through with a spear that he grabs and flings the guy off. Hey, momentum. Hi, Willbo. How are you? Oh you know, just a lot more on a galloping horse. Assholes. Then he gets surrounded by a bunch of samurai, but he has a spear to fend them off. And there’s a flag on the spear with a picture of a tiger! OMG ITS JUST LKE THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVIE!
Except for one little fact. There aren’t tigers in Japan. There are several on the Asian continent, but none in Japan. So, basically, the samurais would have had to leave the country to go fight a tiger. Meaning that the Japanese were, in fact, willing to go outside the country to get resources. Wait a tic, isn’t the entire war that’s the basis for the movie about how foreign interests in Japan had trouble because of the isolationist viewpoint that Japan held in the late 1800’s? Huh, what a load. Anyway, they leader of the samurai rebellion, Katsumoto, takes Tommy to his village. At this point I’d like to mention that Katsumoto is entirely fictional. The real samurai that the movie means is Saigo Takamori. Bullshit.
I’d also like to point something out. The trees when Tom Cruise has a flashback about killing Native Americans and when he gets his ass kicked by the samurai ARE EXACTLY THE SAME. Its pretty fucking apparent that it takes place in the exact same forest. Way to go, film. I’m going to go take shots of Draino until I’m dead.
The movie kind of consists of nothing for a good while after that. Its just Tom learning to love the samurai culture of sitting out in fields, which samurais didn’t do, but whatever (you fucking bastards). Some ninjas show up, and they kill them. There is also a scene where Tom Cruise is practicing with his sword by the sunset. It looks strikingly similar to the cover of a little known video game The Way of the Samurai.
Coincidence, or shitty movie? I decide. Both. Then they take Tom back to Tokyo, where they meet with the emperor and all that bullshit. They also cut off a guy’s hair, which in samurai terms means your honor is disgraced and you should probably kill yourself. But he doesn’t, because this movie sucks.
Oh yeah, the reason that they cut off his hair is because he’s carrying a sword, which the emperor decided to take action against in 1876. OH WAIT. That had been established in 1860, since the Meiji Revolution. YAY. HISTORY. They kind of bullshit it up for awhile, and its time for the big brawl.
Everybody fights, a lot of people die. That’s about it. And Katsumoto decides to commit seppuku, which he does wrong. Instead of kneeling and cutting open his own stomach with a tanto (basically a knife) while someone else cuts off his head, he just jabs a katana into himself, and he dies. This movie fucking sucks.
Then Tom gives Katsumoto’s sword to the emperor, who gives a big speech about it. In English. ENGLISH. As in, not Japanese? The only people in the room are a bunch of Japanese advisors, an American ambassador (who, as a fucking ambassador, should probably know Japanese), and Tom Cruise, who I know for a fact knows Japanese because his character learns it when fucking around with the samurai. This movie sucks.
The Last Samurai really doesn’t need an explanation besides this: complete bullshit. The story just doesn’t make sense, and quite frankly didn’t fucking happen. Now, I realize that sometimes people make movies that are historically inaccurate, like Gladiator. Gladiator didn’t fucking happen, but since its ancient Rome, has good actors in it, and cool fight scenes, I really don’t give a shit. The Last Samurai, however, is a whole new fucking ballgame. The events happen about 125 years ago, not a fucking thousand. That’s a tenth the difference, and while some of you happen to be ignorant bastards, I’m not. At least Gladiator got most of the cultural things right. If it would come to sex, Gladiator would be a teenage hooker and The Last Samurai would be the Internet.
That doesn’t mean Return of the King fared any better under the watchful gaze of Willbo, though. I am a little obliged to mention I got forced into seeing this movie twice, so that was 7 hours of my life. I mastered Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in seven hours. Just to give you a little view on how much I hate my life.
After the Hobbits jack off about bread in the beginning, Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas show up at Saruman’s stupid tower, which is guarded by the Ents. Since the Ents take about two years to say anything, this part, in comparison to the movie, sucks. I don’t really care about this shit, I guess. So let’s get on with it.
Gandalf takes Pippin off to some lame ass city. I hate Pippin. I hate Merry. I hate every fucking Hobbit in the universe. Hobbits fucking blow. Anyway they show up at this city of Gondor where there’s a bastard who doesn’t want the RETURN OF THE KING. Great. Gondor can’t hold some city on some river any longer, so they flee like cowards. Gandalf comes out to help them, bringing Pippin along, my guess is because Gandalf is a fag who likes Hobbits as his sex slaves. He points light at some dragons, that are fucking boss, who are fucking up the troops. That’s right. Light. My brother dubbed this the Flashlight Attack, and rightly so. Gandalf doesn’t do any more magic for the rest of the movie. Which means, as far as I’m concerned, Gandalf uses magic five times during the duration of the three movies.
1. Making fireworks for the Hobbits in the first movie.
2. Breaking a bridge to stop the Balrog in the first movie.
3. Blowing up one of Legolas’s arrows in the second movie.
4. Getting Saruman out of that stupid king of Rohan in the second movie.
5. Using Flashlight Attack on the dragons in the third movie.
Gandalf sucks. Way to go, The White Wizard, you’re mediocre. Sam and Frodo are fucking around trying to destroy the ring, and they see this totally badass guy who is the best ring wraith. He’s fucking awesome. But that doesn’t matter. His fate is so fucking lame I don’t prefer to think he doesn’t exist.
Rohan decides to go help Gondor, and Aragorn leaves with Legolas and Gimli to go get the Army of the Dead in the mountains. That’s fucking stupid, but we’ll get to that later. What’s important here is that this one guy who’s sitting around looks like Brad Pitt’s stunt double. Check him out:
He looks like this the entire movie. That stupid fucking hotshot look. Even when he’s in battle and all of his friends are getting killed, he looks like that. What a shit cock. Anyway, Gondor gets his ass kicked for awhile, until Rohan shows up to fight them off. They do pretty well until the Elephonts show up. By the way, I’d like to point out how stupid that is. Way to be creative, J.R.R. Tolkien.
This bothers me. There’s about twenty of the these big bastards. Now while that’s bad news for Rohan, that’s way too few. In the second movie there’s a patrol of three of those Elephonts. Three. So they can send three of those things off on stupid scouting missions with no real threat, but when the war comes, they only send twenty. That seems just a little wrong to me. But whatever.
Here’s where some major bullshit comes into play. That totally fucking awesome ring wraith shows up, and he gets his ass handed to him by a stupid bitch and Merry the Hobbit. He gets beaten by a Hobbit and a bitch. After he says, “No man can kill me.” She rips off her helmet and says, “I am no man!” Like, “Oh shit, loophole!” She also cuts off the dragon’s head in like two swings. Great. Why don’t you do that to all of them? They seem pretty crappy to me. What a shitty movie.
Aragorn then shows up with his Army of the Dead, which if you’ve ever been on the Haunted Mansion ride at a Disney theme park, will look very familiar. Translucent, green, shitty ghosts. They also proceed to kill EVERYTHING. I’m not kidding. They take down the entire force seizing the city and ten Elephonts in about a minute. Then they let them go. Just like that. YOU ARE FREE. Instead of saying, “Hey, let’s go to Mordor and fuck over Sauron.” It would only take them twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. And while we’re on the topic of Sauron, I just don’t see what’s so fucking scary about him. It’s a goddamn eyeball floating on top of a tower. OOOOOO! DON’T LOOK AT ME! Maybe they should have Gandalf point a fucking flashlight at it.
Now the movie takes a turn for the better. Frodo, after telling Sam to fuck off, meets up with this giant spider. Which, of course, is TTT. Totally Turbo Tits. Its awesome. It doesn’t eat Frodo, which sucks though. In fact it really fucking sucks. Frodo gets wrapped up in web, though, so it looks like he’s done for, but Sam shows up in the nick of time! He also beats the living shit out of the spider. I don’t know where it happened, I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere between The Two Towers and Return of the King, Sam learned to kick some serious ass. He also beats the hell out of some orcs who are above him on a staircase, putting him at a disadvantage. No problem for Sam, who kicks ass.
Basically the movie goes downhill from here. Sam and Frodo go to destroy the ring, but Frodo doesn’t want to. So what does happen is Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger and gets tossed into the lava of Mt. Doom (oh my god that’s a stupid name). Then everybody else in the movie, who’s fighting against Mordor’s evil forces or something, win because all of the orcs run away for no reason. Whatever. Also these eagle show up and start kicking the dragons’ ass. It kind of comes out left field. Like if you were walking down the street and a clown disembowel you with a Hello Kitty dildo, I would have expected that over some eagles showing up. And everybody starts yelling, “The Eagles! The Eagles!” Maybe they’re really important in the book or something, but in these movies, they fucking come out of nowhere. I remember that one was in the first movie that saved Gandalf. That’s it. I don’t remember fucking seven.
Now the movie really takes a turn for the worst. It takes twenty minutes to end, and NOTHING happens. It consists of everybody laughing and hugging Frodo, which is really gay, Aragorn becoming the king of Gondor, which is really stupid because he starts singing, everybody bowing to the Hobbits, which is stupid because none of them really did anything, Sam getting married to a fat chick, and Frodo leaving on a stupid boat to magical elf land. This movie blows, a much better ending would have been this:
Sam: Well, Frodo, we’re here in the Shire.
Hobbit: Sam! Sam! She’s pregnant!
Sam: Who? My wife!? Yay! I’m a father!
Hobbit: No, that spider from the middle of the movie!
Spider: RWOAR!!!!
Enter a million spiders that are all huge and destroy the Shire. Take that, you fucking Hobbits. Now before I go, I’d just like to point out how stupid the entire idea of the Lord of the Rings. ONE RING TO RULE THEM ALL. What? Think about it. A fucking ring that controls people? That’s stupid. And if Sauron could make one, why doesn’t he just make one for every one of his fingers and toes? What a stupid fucking movie.
I am the One true satirist to rule them all, roxorboxors@hotmail.com
~Willbo Baggins