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"No disrespect intended, sir, but shove it up your ass."

One of the problems with being a ridiculously famous, instantly recognizable actor is that you are instantly recognizable. You bring baggage to every role, a generally accepted persona you must overcome, an image that will almost inevitably get in the way of the character. Suddenly, to turn in an acceptable performance, it is no longer enough to be merely competent. You have to know how to disappear into your character, make us forget who we are actually watching, sell us the story you're presumably inhabiting. You have to be great.

Al Pacino is spectacular at this. So are Russell Crowe, Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Morgan Freeman. Tom Cruise? Not so much.

Don't misunderstand me. I think Tom Cruise is a very good performer, and his track record for choosing quality projects is excellent. But he is, always and forever, Tom Cruise. He is excellent in films that are emphatically "Tom Cruise Movies," stories in which he is the star, the hero, the end-all, be-all of the moviegoing experience.* In my otherwise positive review of Vanilla Sky, I wrote that though there was nothing technically wrong with Cruise's performance, his very presence threatened to overwhelm the story and turn the entire thing into a farce. In The Last Samurai, it does precisely that.

Cruise crushes this movie under his weight, pushing everything interesting to the fringes of the frame. I'm not even objecting to the fact that it's fairly patronizing to tell about the end of the samurai culture in Japan from the point of view of an American, because it's a given that this movie would otherwise never have been made. Fine. But Cruise's Nathan Algren is bland, boring, and self-absorbed, and I wanted him out of the way, even though the supporting characters, with a couple of exceptions, aren't very interesting either.

Algren is a Civil War veteran haunted by memories of a brutal, pointless slaughter initiated by Colonel Bagley (Tony Goldwyn), his superior officer. Now he bides his time at a carnival exhibit, shilling rifles for a gun manufacturer and drinking profuse amounts of alcohol. Just when the fed up Algren shocks the audience with a spectacular display of recklessness, Bagley comes back onto the scene and recruits Algren to train the Japanese army, which is preparing for a fight against samurai rebels who are resisting the country's westernization.

The army is ambushed and Algren is kidnapped. Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), the leader of the rebels, keeps him alive, presumably after seeing him valiantly take on several of his men -- sounds dandy, but the absurdity of that scene is almost beyond description. After healing at the hands of the woman whose husband he killed, Algren walks around the samurai encampment, like all good westerners mystified and puzzled, filling his journal with gems like "There is indeed something spiritual in this place." Of course, aside from the kindly and honorable samurai, there is also the dark, malevolent samurai who just wants to smash things, though he eventually settles for taking out his aggression by beating up Tom Cruise.

Katsumoto seems to be an interesting fellow, and Ken Watanabe is an engaging, intense performer, but his ideals and those of his fellow samurai are reduced to contemplating and/or committing suicide as often as possible. What happened to the daring and resourcefulness of the Seven Samurai? If you believe this film, all that the legendary warriors do is threaten to kill themselves. Sometimes they even ask permission.

My problems with Tom Cruise were likely of a more personalized nature and may not apply to everyone, but I can only refer to my own reactions. I did not buy into him for a second. When he and Watanabe are on the battlefield, musing thoughtfully about destiny and other such hefty topics, all I could do was mentally flash to to the shooting of the film, with the wind machine blowing through Cruise's hair and the actor morosely delivering the lines, his make-up artists and personal assistants standing at the ready just outside the frame. Everything in this movie is about Tom Cruise. What happened to, you know, the Japanese?

The battle scenes are conventionally directed by Edward Zwick (Glory, Courage Under Fire), who does occasionally indulge in some head-scratching stylistics: at one point, the editing starts to match the beat of the soundtrack, and I thought I was suddenly watching a trailer. Subtlety is clearly not in his repertoire: the thudding "significance" of the Emperor's officer yelling "bring the new guns!" is just digusting. Then there's that horrible, horrible Big Tom Cruise Moment wherein Jerry Maguire hurls a dagger at his nemesis, impaling him through the throat. And of course, the schmaltzy ending gives him all the glory, as if no characters of Asian descent mattered or even existed. To his credit, he doesn't forget to offer to kill himself.