Cruise’s acting limitations hurt ‘Last Samurai’

In theaters

THE LAST SAMURAI, directed by Edward Zwick, written by Zwick, John Logan and Marshall Herkovitz, 147 minutes, rated R.

The new Tom Cruise movie, “The Last Samurai,” is a film at war with itself. It’s torn between what it wants to be – a big, sweeping epic hoping to cut a swath to the Academy Awards – and what it can’t be because of the dramatic limitations of its star.

As such, the movie has its moments, some of which are bold, rip-snorting fun, nicely recalling the hypnotic greatness of Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai,” “Ran” and “Rashomon,” while other moments are just plain dumb, heavy-handed and awful.

As directed by Edward Zwick from a screenplay he co-wrote with John Logan and Marshall Herkovitz, the movie finds Cruise trying so hard to express the depth of his character’s emotion, there are times when you fear he’ll have a stroke doing so.

That’s no joke. At one point, toward the end of this uneven, 2 1/2-hour romp in Japan, Cruise trembles with such grief, rage, injustice and despair, his eyes literally begin to cross and you sense that this is it. The man really is going to be the first actor ever to pass out onscreen from overacting.

They should give him an Academy Award just for the effort. As an actor, Cruise has always been self-aware to the point of distraction and he never has fully lost himself in a role. But this time out, unlike his turns in “Top Gun,” the “Mission: Impossible” movies and the recent “Minority Report,” which benefited from his mechanical brand of cocky intensity, that isn’t a virtue.

What he needed to bring to “The Last Samurai” was something less showy, less obvious, less Cruisy. He does score when he’s called upon to fight in the film’s rousing action sequences, which are beautifully filmed by cinematographer John Toll. But when he’s asked to act, you’re always aware that he’s acting, which robs the film of the dramatic undercurrent it needed to succeed.

In the film, Cruise is Capt. Nathan Algren, an alcohol-soaked Civil War wreck who survived Little Bighorn and is now prostituting himself at traveling sideshows as a poster child for patriotic honor and courage. It’s 1876 and Algren has reached the end of the line; thanks to the bloodshed he created and witnessed on the battlefield, he’s a ruined man questioning his existence.

When he’s recruited by a Japanese railroad magnate and sent to Yokohama to train the imperial Army to lose their Eastern ways and fight with a Western sensibility – you know, lose the arrows and swords in favor of guns, cannons and ammo – he unwittingly steps into the next chapter of his life, which turns out to be an open book filled with far more possibilities than he ever expected.

Indeed, after killing a samurai warrior, he finds himself captured by Lord Kasumoto (Ken Watanabe), a commanding presence who senses in Algren a strong-willed man who might benefit from his conversation and tutelage. Their relationship is born. Algren moves in with the wife and family of the samurai warrior he slaughtered, and is disappointed not to find an open bar. One of the film’s more curious spectacles is watching Algren go through detox, with Cruise writhing nearly naked on the floor and screaming for rounds of sake, which he hungrily gulps before his host family, led by the beautiful widow, Taka (supermodel Koyuki), shuts him off completely. Some who see the movie will want to hug her for it.

Since a good deal of the film relies on its superlative action scenes – the very sort in which Cruise excels – “The Last Samurai” is far from a wash. The final battle between a divided Japan, for instance, is enormously satisfying and raw, and the movie actually improves as it unfolds – it allows for more skirmishes and fewer moments for Cruise to narrow his eyes and look meaningfully just offscreen.

Supporting performances from Billy Connolly and Timothy Spall give the film a comedic lift, while Tony Goldwyn and Hiroyuki Sanada are allowed to snake around the edges, raising the film’s elements of evil. All are fine, but nobody here, not even Cruise, matches the solid work of Watanabe, a huge star in Japan who is destined to become one here.

In the end, “The Last Samurai” is a mixed bag of carefully packaged entertainment, with little room for spontaneity or surprise. As for the ending (and stop reading now if you don’t want it spoiled), which dives recklessly and shamelessly into mythmaking, it turns out that Japan’s last samurai wasn’t a native of that country, but an American war veteran renewed with Eastern customs and a crisp outlook on life.

I wonder how the Japanese feel about that.

Grade: C

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, 5:30 p.m. Thursdays on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived at RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.