11 Rebels (2024)
Fight for your freedom.
Tonight’s movie did it’s best to confuse me before I even started - Amazon video, prime service that it is, decided to randomly attach a different and completely unrelated modern zombie movie box art to it, leading me to wonder why I hadn’t bookmarked that samurai movie I saw and why I put a zombie movie in there when I haven’t actively been chasing after zombie movies since Train to Busan came out what feels like forever ago. Anyways, I couldn’t find the horror movie from a dogs perspective and the comity voted for some fun sword slashing action, so samurais it is. In a way, it’s kind of fitting that it played the deception card from the beginning, but I wouldn’t learn that until later on. For now, grab your ladder logos to rep another team and pull your swords out, tonight we watch 11 Rebels.
A historically set piece in a world where guns are becoming a thing, and political power moves amongst the different ruling lords is a thing as it always is, the movie might be perceived as taking a little bit of time to rev up. We start with one of the characters of our ensemble getting revenge on a samurai who raped his wife - putting him in most people “you are still bad for doing that, but we find your actions satisfying” crowd - while spending as much if not more time with the samurai side of things as they go about their political moves. The lord of one nation wants the focal lordship to send soldiers to help them out against the emperor, when unbeknownst to him said lordship actually wants to side with the Emperor. A dilemma arises when both decide to meet with the lordship the same day - so in a plot to game the system he gets his reagent to tell a bunch of criminals that if they defend a fort for two or three days they’ll be pardoned - a promise we find out is totally bogus. That should delay the imperial army enough that he can satisfy both meetings with none being the wiser. Key back into our original revenge-murderer now getting a pardon with a ragtag assorted lot of “rebels” with crimes ranging from being too pretty all the way to being a serial killer, and their increasingly escalating unfortunate events as three days spirals pretty out of control.
Actors do a good job here with their body language in and out of fights. I suppose we could put some of it up to maybe feeling slightly overacted at times, but I think it’s more showy then specifically tapping into the hard-and-gritty realism anyways, so it doesn’t bother me at all. I did watch the dubbed version, because I was eating a sandwich while watching and didn’t want to miss what was being said if i had an unfortunate accident that drew my eyes away from the screen in a stuffings-down panic. That said, I feel the english voice overs did a good job with things, even if there are a few dubbing moments where things got shuffled around to line up with mouth movements I got keyed into because of the subtitles. I don’t think there will be much in the lines of complaints towards it being poorly acted - I think any of the real sticking points will largely just be someone not liking how a character is acted more than anything else, and that I feel leads into the characters.
The characters are there - all ten plus rebels, and a bunch of political types, and the “bad guys” as it were. Some have more depth than others, with a few getting specific shown or explained motivations. Pretty much all the crew get at least an explanation of why they are a criminal anyways, and some comradery does form between some of them. There’s even a few moments that go miles to really show you just who a character is - like using your own team as a shield. Only one really has anything I would go as far as to call growth, but the mileage there will vary. It’s enough to facilitate the movies plot and get you semi-attached to a person or two or the unit as a whole, but I don’t think that most the characters are going to have you wishing they had their own side-story prequels or anything. That being said, the old samurai guy was absolutely baller and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of him somewhere.
Arrival of the suicide company.
Costumes get to have fun here. Slightly different to many of the period stuff I watch, in part probably because most the stuff I’ve seen is usually more pre-introduction of common placed guns. Still, some of the costumes get the fancy red manes, we get plenty of variation amongst our band of criminals, and some uniforms for various sides in there to keep it from getting to same-same. Of course, the props and accessories are plentiful and although not quite as varied as a “hero” type ensemble flick where almost everyone has their own super unique weapons and styles to go with, it still provides plenty of things to cut or go boom with. The set itself has a few various things to it, although admittedly those who crave a ton of variation might be less thrilled, since the bulk of the movie is the fort defense as opposed to traveling or city watching.
Action scenes are great. I mean, perhaps they aren’t the best fight scenes you’ve ever seen, but I had a lot of fun with them and they were shot pretty well. For the realism demanding, they might be annoyed over the constant many versus one setups and how often the one can get through them - but given our entire case it made up of essentially cannon-fodder on the good guy side, they don’t shy away from people getting hurt or killed in the fights so it keeps you on your toes to some regard. This is largely why the movie got added to my list anyways - I don’t recall if it was just because the trailer action looked cool or i had heard it from one of the “best action movie ever” YouTube videos I occasionally peruse. Either way I have no real complaints with the actions scenes beyond potentially how robbed you feel whenever someone gets killed by a gun.
Audio is really the first place I have any issues, but once again I think it’s more to do with the streaming service and me needing to re-balance my computers audio outputs. After cranking my volume as a whole up things weren’t badly balanced and it was all pretty fine and understandable. Music did it’s background support role so well I don’t even remember it, which is to be expected of me but also makes me a little sad since foreign historical settings always provide me with great classical instruments from abroad, and I love hearing that stuff. For the thinking person, we’ve got plenty of thoughts that come with politics such as lies and expendability, good of few versus many - that sort of stuff. On the moral side, you get the stuff like “is killing a rapist in revenge technically justified or morally sound?” - which I’m sure could be an absolutely rancid back and forth debate between people, as I can’t see that one being something where people would be polite about it.
The competition arrives early.
I had a good time with this movie. Apparently somewhere said that a good amount of the movie was cut for the US 4K release, but I don’t know if that’s what I watched or not - but I’m assuming it is because it’s only 2 hours long instead of 2 and a half. I don’t really think that the extra half hour would make the movie vastly improved as I still followed it fine and enjoyed my time, but without seeing that extra 30 minutes I really can’t speak to if it’s game changing or extra character building or not. Still, it had some good fights and a classic premise, and everything looked wonderful so I didn’t have a whole lot of complaints while watching.