An average movie

I wasn’t expecting much from the damned thing but since it was starring Clive Owen and Morgan Freeman and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. First of all, it was probably one of the most derivative titles I came across. To be honest, it’s only afterwards that I discovered that it was based on the 47 Ronin legend but even though it was not as bad as the Keanu Reeves vehicle was, it was still pretty weak though. In fact, even though I didn’t make the connection with ’47 Ronin’, for some reason, this movie did remind me of ‘King Arthur’. Indeed, I did rewatch the damned thing not so long ago and I was rather baffled by how miscast Clive Owen was in this movie. Well, more than 10 years later, Owen was again leading another medieval action flick and, to be honest, I thought the guy was again really unconvincing. It’s such a shame because the 47 Ronin legend is actually pretty awesome and they could make a great movie out of this story. Unfortunately, in this case, the whole thing was just so pretentious and very often rather boring. Especially, in the 2^nd act, was it really necessary to have Clive Owen’s character pretending to be a drunk for so goddamned long? On a narrative level, it was also rather awkward that the really annoying bad guy turned out to be right to be paranoid all along. Eventually, they spent at least half of the duration arguing that this guy was evil, delusional and wasting all kind of resources but, eventually, he was the only one who actually figured out what was going on. Anyway, to conclude, I think I was probably generous with my rating here, the damned thing was just terribly forgettable and you should probably avoid it.