YO-FUCKEN-JIMBO!!!! 

Just when I thought Mifune had reached the pinnacle of badassery in THRONE OF BLOOD, he goes and makes this. Wow. The guy is so versatile he could pull out the stops anytime, anywhere. Going full-blown Wyatt Earp-John Wayne while dressed in samurai gear at a Japanese O.K. Corral!? Ok Kurosawa, you have my attention. This film moves with such muscle and visual energy, a superhuman display of swordsmanship told with human levels of revenge. It may not have the sweeping epic feel of SEVEN SAMURAI, or the epistemological dilemmas of RASHOMON, but man is this film hyper-cool to the bone. Echoes of Ford give way to sparks of Leone, but the real joy is watching how this blade-swinging, toothpick-chomping, civil-warring tale pits evil against evil, then casually sits back with popcorn and smiles while Twitter burns itself to the ground. 

From the moment that dog prances down main street with Ash's severed hand in its jaws, we know what kind of world Mifune has stepped into. This is a brutal, Hobbesian town ruled by crime and comedy, a nasty little village split into two rival factions bent on self-destruction. Kurosawa called it a tale of "senseless battles of bad against bad," where order has become chaos, and chaos leads mercenaries like Mifune to seize the opportunity and make bank from both sides. Nothing quite like feudal capitalism at its most adroit and bloody to cash out on catastrophe, eh? I might even call YOJIMBO a satirical presage to the age of information, and how information can be used to provoke clash and stoke culture wars. 

Mifune plays a fast-and-loose ronin, he's no longer tethered to a strict Bushido code, and so his morals are less than pure but nowhere near as vile as the oafish goons he starts a village flame war with. In a different suit, he might just be the avenging yakuza in DRUNKEN ANGEL trying to clean up the evil around him. There’s also a certain shade of troll in him that revels in spreading death and destruction, at least among watching the wicked destroy the wicked. He clandestinely barters his services to both sides, like the perfect joker who gets off on watching the world burn. He's the reason why the farmers in SEVEN SAMURAI have serious trust issues. It's not just his sword that makes him scary, but his cunning, ambiguous wits. He's the anti-hero we love to root for, someone we just wanna see kickass and chew toothpicks.

Mifune isn't all internet troll. Yeah he'll sit back and watch both camps exterminate each other, but he also proves he has a Jiminy Cricket, a lurking conscience that sees several people in this shitty town worth saving. It'll nearly cost him his life, but ssshhhh, don't tell him he's a softie. He hates gratitude. He sees human kindness as a weakness ("Shut up –I hate grateful people. If you cry I'm going to kill you right now."). It's like he can't make up his mind between being the uninvolved gambler in THE LOWER DEPTHS who chalks up human misery for laughs, versus the involved bureaucrat from IKIRU who wants to serve an ethical purpose before he flickers out. Maybe he’s the hybrid god of deism and theism, someone who descends to save a wretched town, then ascends in a plume of smoke while forcing those left behind to make sense of the chaos left in his wake.

No, YOJIMBO isn't just escapist samurai cinema. It has a spine. It has guts. Kurosawa's technical mastery is enhanced by Mifune's performative badassery, a killer combination. It's looking to chambara and cowboy archetypes and subverting them into samurai and gangster analogues, which works well to reflect then-contemporary Japan. Also, is it me, or is there something slightly Tarantinoesque about the music, violence and staging of these epic standoffs? Leone borrowed heavily from this film, and Tarantino borrowed heavily from Leone, so I guess it checks out. If you’re just getting into Kurosawa's work, make YOJIMBO your entry point. Slick, hip, funny and brutal, it's guaranteed to entertain.

Kurosawa Ranked