Yurusarezaru mono

I loved the original Clint Eastwood version and this is an excellent retelling. Few people know how much the Japanese frontier of Hokkaido parallels the American west and this story really takes you inside of that. It is a very different story due to cultural and factual differences, but the core tale rings through. I saw this when it first came out and I re-watched it just the other night. If you like action and drama you owe it to yourself to watch this. Every aspect of this movie including story, acting, directing, and editing is near perfect. This is a true hidden gem.

This movie is an homage to the spaghetti westerns that made Clint Eastwood. They took eastern samurai stories and made them westerns. This does the opposite. It takes an original western script and turns it into an eastern samurai story. Is it perfect? No but it's beautiful. It's worth your time. Watanabe is superb and the cinematography rivals that of the original. In an attempt to match the slow development of the original it may fall short in what ends up being a slow burn. But if you love Clint. Or you love Ken. Or you love westerns. Or you love (easterns) samurai stories. This will sit well with you.

When a movie is as brilliant as Eastwood's Unforgiven, it's very hard if not impossible to watch its remake with a fresh eye. I tried, but could not succeed. I kept wishing I was watching the original. Not to say it was a bad film, not at all, but there are some major flaws in this movie. First of all, the characters and actors were nowhere as charismatic as in the original. Not that they were bad, but imho they lack the emotional depth and nuance that their predecessors had. While Gene Hackman's role seemed beautifully fleshed out, his Japanese counterpart is merely a psychopath.

The film imitates parts from the original at places were they could have strayed off a bit, and vice versa. Sometimes it felt I was watching a western, just with Japanese actors, while I expected it to be a samourai movie. There are scenes from Unforgiven 1 and 2 with matching color palettes, which I think is a shame. Why not go for a totally different approach? Accentuate the differences, not the similarities. But there are scenes in the original that had a lot of punch (eg the final shootout scene), which have been given a different approach and therefore fail.

Where it succeeds is the beautiful cinematography, and the conclusion of Japanese Will Munny's character. I also like the symbolic use of the elements like rain and snow.

But as said, I'm extremely prejudiced (Eastwood's Unforgiven is one of my favourite movies) and perhaps the viewer who is not familiar with the original will love this one just as well.

Let me start by saying that I am aware of the parallels and similarities between many modern Eastwood westerns and Kurosawa samurai films. I am also a huge fan of Ken Watanabe.

This film falls short because of the directing. Many of the things that made the 1992 cowboy film so great are missing here. Without spoiling it, I think fans of the original will be very disappointed, especially with the ending.

The cinematography is amazing. Ken Watanabe does the best he can. I thought this would have been easy to remake but I was very disappointed.

What goes around comes around. Just as a fair number of westerns were remakes of classic Japanese Samurai movies so Sang-il Lee's "Unforgiven" is a fairly literal remake of Clint Eastwood's Oscar winner of the same name. Here we may be dealing with samurai but that doesn't disguise the fact that these guys may as well be cowboys and this could be the American West. It's a reasonably exciting and handsome picture, gorgeously shot in widescreen by Norimichi Kasamatsu, but it is also so close to the original it feels almost negligible. Ken Watanabe plays the Eastwood role but it's something of a one-note performance; he lacks Clint's gravitas. This could have been a classic but as it is it's nothing more than a very good copy.