The Last Samurai: Critic Reviews

A handsome epic.

The uneven Samurai is a can-do movie that's far more effective at communicating emotion in bigger scenes than in more intimate ones.

Zwick is attracted to the notions of victory in defeat and the romantic purity of self-sacrifice. His film is, however, a trifle earnest and overlong.

It's all so stolid and humorless, even the scenes in San Francisco, without compensating epic sweep.

Despite its intelligent agenda, swollen heart and fabulously epic surface, amounts to a didactic banality: a white guy's politically correct lesson abroad.

It's wannabe-ism on a multimillion-dollar scale, with an icon of Japanese culture somehow crudely penetrated by an interloper and turned inside out.

Big and square and rousing, Edward Zwick's epic drama has been brought to the screen with all the muscle and splendor Hollywood can call up.

The least one can say for this costume action flick is that it hits bottom immediately.

Cruise isn't horribly miscast, a la Tony Curtis in The Son of Ali Baba or John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror, but he doesn't miss by far.

Despite the slow-moving and overly reverential parts, Algren's passage from bitter, self-loathing alcoholic to a man renewed and committed is emotionally satisfying in a way many bloated recent Hollywood productions can't accomplish.

It has the flourish and even the delicacy of those whose life it celebrates.

Nearly all of The Last Samurai's deficiencies spring from the screenplay... As respectful as it is about the similarities of different cultures, it also doesn't quite elude an aura of noble otherness.

The Last Samurai is an idyll in which the savageries of existence are transcended by spiritual devotion. That's a beautiful dream, and it gives the film a deep pleasingness, but the fullness of life and its blackest ambiguities are sacrificed.

Beautifully designed, intelligently written, acted with conviction, it's an uncommonly thoughtful epic.

A stunning spectacle of cultural violence and a loving tribute to the great Japanese samurai movies.

It's not just Hollywood convention that gets in the way of the story, it's the lack of depth, heft and heart at its core.

As the story evolves into a drama with as much heart as muscle, Cruise adapts with it.

This is one of those films that decries war while reveling in it, that praises the purity of the noble savage and then slays him, exulting in the blood while worrying over the act.

A splendid, robust historical drama.

Even though The Last Samurai is brutal, exhausting and so not my kind of movie, it is extremely well-made and undeniably engrossing.

Disappointingly content to recycle familiar attitudes about the nobility of ancient cultures, Western despoilment of them, liberal historical guilt, the unrestrainable greed of capitalists and the irreducible primacy of Hollywood movie stars.

A pandering epic that's as phony as it is condescending.

Grand and undersized, truncated and overlong, The Last Samurai reminds us just enough of what epics used to be to disappoint.

It looks great in a costume spectacle way, and it has some truly terrific action sequences.

Grandly overblown and deeply cornball, The Last Samurai is a visually detailed historical recreation of 19th-century Japan that's as thin as rice paper in ideas.