Disgracing the master: the five worst remakes of Akira Kurosawa movies

Posted On December 7, 2024December 7, 2024

The impact made by Akira Kurosawa continues to be felt decades after the Japanese icon’s death, and his reputation will be secure until the end of time as one of the finest – and arguably the single most influential – directors to ever wield the megaphone.

That so many legends – a list that includes Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Andrei Tarkovsky, and many more – named Kurosawa as one of their biggest inspirations speaks volumes to just how much the medium owes to his trailblazing talents.

His stories, techniques, and motifs have been liberally lifted in an innumerable amount of films over the years, and it’s far from a bad thing. Kurosawa has been a touchstone in some classics and masterpieces in their own right, but every coin has two sides.

Cinema is littered with remakes that channel Kurosawa to varying degrees of success, but few have ever dropped the ball as bad as the following five.

The five worst remakes of Akira Kurosawa movies:

Tsubaki Sanjuro (Yoshimitsu Morita, 2007)

Any movie that sets out to remake Kurosawa, regardless of how subtle or obvious it may be, will always face the pressure that comes with trying to put a fresh spin on a tale told by not just one of cinema’s greatest-ever storytellers but also one of the medium’s finest visual minds.

Director Yoshimitsu Morita used the exact same script, deciding that it wasn’t worth the hassle to even try writing a new or even different one. Kurosawa wrote 1962’s Sanjuro alongside Ryūzō Kikushima and Hideo Oguni, using Shugoro Namamoto’s Hibi Heian as their inspiration. So, 2007’s Tsubaki Sanjuro opted for the ‘if it ain’t broke’ approach.

It’s not a terrible film, but it does feel like a pointless one. By using the same script and many of the same shots, Morita doesn’t make much of an attempt to say anything new or imprint the the samurai thriller with his own style or sensibilities, leaving the end result as a more of a photocopy that didn’t need to exist than a fresh take on a classic.

Omega Doom (Albert Pyun, 1996)

There are genre junkies who’d argue that Omega Doom is a cult gem and entirely deserving of that status, and while that’s true to a certain extent, the biggest reason why action fanatics appreciate the mid-1990s sci-fi so much is because it’s awful.

In fairness, casting Rutger Hauer as a character called Omega Doom in a movie hailing from the director of Alien from LA, Kickboxer 2, and Brainsmasher: A Love Story that takes place in a dystopian future where two opposing factions of cyborgs are pitted against each other was never going to stand up under scrutiny.

As a remake of Yojimbo, it sucks. As a work of cinema, it’s not exactly overflowing with artistic and creative virtuosity. As a cheesy, low-budget, poorly-directed affair that takes itself so seriously it accidentally plays as a parody, it’s admittedly easy to see why it’s been inching towards cult status.

Inferno (John G Avildsen, 1999)

A Kurosawa remake hailing from the Academy Award-winning director of Rocky might sound like an intriguing prospect on paper, but John G Avildsen’s career was nowhere near its peak when he made his final feature, Inferno.

Along similar lines to Omega Doom, the fact that it’s a Yojimbo remake from a filmmaker who hadn’t made anything good in decades that boasts Jean-Claude Van Damme in the lead role with support from Danny Trejo indicates that expectations needed to be suitably lowered.

That said, Inferno somehow manages to plummet below them, using Kurosawa’s masterpiece as the jumping-off point for a standard high-kicking Van Damme vehicle where his drifter rides into a desert town and works both sides of the local criminal underworld to retrieve his stolen motorcycle was a waste of a timeless premise.

The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (Bruno Mattei, 1983)

Kurosawa made Seven Samurai, a film that completely changed the face of cinema. John Sturges thought it would make the perfect backdrop for a western, and he was right after he made one of the greats with The Magnificent Seven. What didn’t either version have? Gladiators, obviously.

Cribbing from both titles, Bruno Mattei’s B-tier swords-and-sandal story has more bulging biceps and baby oil than either of those two aforementioned favourites combined, and that’s just Lou Ferrigno in the lead role of Han.

For anyone who thought Seven Samurai was lacking in oversized trapezius muscles and washboard abs, then The Seven Magnificent Gladiators might be worth a punt. For everybody else, it uses an identical plot to much lesser effect, and it isn’t even a good gladiator movie.

Rebel Moon (Zack Snyder, 2023/2024)

The startling lack of originality on display in Rebel Moon goes far beyond the two-part Netflix sci-fi epic being not only Seven Samurai in space but starting life as a standalone Star Wars spinoff before Zack Snyder and Lucasfilm decided to go in different directions.

By taking his talents to streaming, Snyder was given complete creative freedom to make exactly the kind of movie he wanted. For reasons known only to him, he decided that a combined 256 minutes of tedium was the best approach: it’s too long, it’s far too boring, it’s excessive, it’s self-indulgent, it’s uninteresting, unexciting, and basically everything Seven Samurai is not.

Anyone brave enough to even attempt to sit through the extended versions – which clock in a ludicrous 377 minutes combined – deserves a medal for their endurance. Seven Samurai has been remade in dozens of different ways, but never quite so monotonously lifeless.

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