Mifune: The Last Samurai movie review (2016)

That said, “Mifune: The Last Samurai,” a documentary on the actor directed by Steven Okazaki and narrated by Keanu Reeves (the script is by Okazaki and Stuart Galbraith IV) got off on a somewhat bad foot for me. Explaining Mifune’s place in the firmament of pop culture, the narration says of his collaborations with director Akira Kurosawa, “without them there would have been no ‘Magnificent Seven.’” This is factually true but seems to me to throw out a very crucial baby with the bathwater. What makes Kurosawa and Mifune crucial is that without them there would be no “Seven Samurai.”

But the fact of the matter is that I’m not the “key demo” for this movie. “Mifune: The Last Samurai” wasn’t made for fans like me. Although fans like me will likely be the first in line to see it. After explaining Mifune’s importance, the movie lays out a brief history of Japanese cinema, the “chanbara” (swordplay) movie in particular. Only then does it get to Mifune’s fascinating life: Born in 1920 to parents who set up business in China, he only sets foot in Japan at age 20, to fight in World War II. That experience was traumatic, but not in a conventional way. Harboring no ambitions to act, he tries to follow a bit in his photographer father’s footsteps by apprenticing as a camera assistant at a film studio. His good looks, simultaneously rugged and smooth get him noticed, and so…

What the movie is very good at revealing and expanding upon is how this reluctant actor became such a masterful one. In part it was due to his presence. “He’s not an actor who blends into the background,” one of his surviving colleagues notes. In part it was due to what his life experience taught him. His experience made him determined, one interviewee notes, to “never again be the kind of person who bends to authority.” But it was also, eventually, his devotion and his research. His frequent costar and friend Yoshio Tsuchiya notes “The one word I would use to describe Mifune is ‘perseverance’!”