by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

There's this funny thing about Tom Cruise, an actor that for most part I (and many others) can't abide. His rat-like mug, his stiff and imperious overacting, his utter blandness and again, his rat-like mug - it all adds up to a good rationale for not seeing his movies.

However, he is oddly tolerable in films like Rain Man and Magnolia, simply because in those films he plays a prick. I guess being an asshole is something that just comes naturally to the man. Thus Cruise, the main reason I'd have avoided The Last Samurai, doesn't hinder matters until two-thirds through.

Cruise plays Captain Nathan Algren, an alcoholic veteran of the ethnic cleansing campaigns in the States in the 19th century. He's shipped to Japan to school the Emperor's army in how to crush an uprising of what the Japanese money men see as a bunch of backward savages. Seems Algren was all too good at that. Thing is, the "savages" are in fact a clique of hard-headed samurai, fierce warriors making fast work of Algren's troops and capturing Algren in the process.

Algren's soon siding with his captors as they strap on their armour and charge the cannons and Gatling guns in blaze-of-glory Light Brigade style. The yardstick for gauging the inherent nobility of a character in major films these days is the slowness of the slow-motion in which their death is captured. This is probably John Woo's fault - he stole the slow-mo violence thing from Sam Peckinpah, for whom it was cold and clinical and not the least bit noble, and made it shorthand for "This guy's, like, a martyr!"

Sure, the battle scenes - money shots in the military-epic milieu - rock. The surprise ninja attack on the samurai compound certainly delivers the goods. But how much does one learn about this lost samurai culture, other than that they're really into the whole honour trip? While the push-and-pull between tradition and modernity that Japan experienced at the time is well handled, the complexity and controversy of the samurai class are ignored. This leaves The Last Samurai, while pretty and technically commendable, hollow at its core.

The Last Samurai opens Friday, Dec. 5

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