Cruise goes for the kill

I've been in battle an awful lot recently. Before Christmas I was in the thick of it, parrying with orcs, besting trolls and clashing with Uruk-hai. Then, a few nights ago, I found myself at sea, receiving volley after volley of lethal shots from the guns of a French privateer.

But this week has to be the worst of my battles. With neither a ghost army nor Russell Crowe to rely on, I have been up against the newfangled howitzers of the Japanese Imperial Army, my only comrades a gang of sword-wielding ascetics wearing helmets that looked like pyramids of burnt toast. Oh, and there was Tom Cruise.

In the latest fictionalisation of his machismo, Cruise plays Captain Nathan Algren, a bibulous veteran of the genocidal wars fought by the Union Army against the Native Americans. Disgusted by his involvement in the 1870s equivalent of the My Lai massacre, Algren develops a death wish which takes him to Japan.

He undertakes to train the nascent Imperial Army to wipe out the renegade samurai, warriors who reject all aspects of modernity but especially firearms (which, it is worth noting, were banned from Japan by common agreement for 500 years, a rare example of a sophisticated culture rejecting technological innovation).

However, leading an unprepared force against the toast-helmets, Algren is captured by Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), who turns out to be a warlord of rare delicacy and refinement, preoccupied just as much by penning haikus about cherry blossom as he is by encouraging his defeated enemies to disembowel themselves.

So far, so portentous. This is the latest in a long line of revisionist histories of American expansion that runs back through Dances with Wolves and Little Big Man, all the way to Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.

The comparison with Peckinpah is not idle, because, like the great poet of cinematic bloodletting, Last Samurai director Edward Zwick favours a loving slow motion when the ketchup begins to spurt. And, like Peckinpah's films, this one relies on a nostalgic characterisation of the doomed warrior culture; we are invited to revere the samurai as examples not of primitive savagery, but mystical rectitude.

Algren learns, wonderingly, that samurai means "to serve", and he is much taken by the "perfection" with which these people undertake every task, from decapitation to pouring tea. Soi-disant civilisation is represented, on the other hand, by rapacious American envoys seeking trade concessions for arms sales, who prey on an enfeebled and corrupt Imperial court. So it's no wonder that a good guy such as Algren swaps from being a mercenary to fighting for something he can believe in - no matter how alien.

The eminent military historian John Keegan, in his book The Face of Battle, analyses battles through history with particular attention to what he terms "the killing zone", the actual area of the melee within which you were likely to receive a fatal wound. Unsurprisingly, the more modern the conflict, the bigger the killing zone. I'd like to propose a similar axiom for war movies: the bigger the budget, the bigger the critical killing zone. Faced with massed hordes of extras, and disorientated by the heat and stench of combat, the critics slump in their seats and give up the ghost.

But there is much to like in The Last Samurai; frankly, you have to warm to any movie which casts Billy Connolly as a bellowing sergeant-major, affecting a ludicrous Oirish accent, and then unceremoniously despatches him with a large spear during the first battle scene. With Connolly culled, this is very much Cruise's picture. Watanabe is also credible, and the Japanese supporting players workmanlike enough. Timothy Spall, though, makes an unwelcome appearance (what is an actor of his calibre doing there?), playing the sort of sweaty-linen-suited expat who, in olden times, would have been portrayed by Robert Morley.