Wild West characters find their place in the Far East

There is probably no director more obsessed with the complexity of patriotism -- an unusual subject to plumb in mainstream films -- than Edward Zwick, who is driven to question the imperatives of an America that his protagonists both love and detest. His latest movie, The Last Samurai, falls squarely into the realm of the previous Zwick bedeviled-hero films, Glory, Courage Under Fire and The Siege.

And I do mean squarely. Samurai is a mythic western that combines a fish-out-of-water theme with an immersion in Japanese culture: John Ford's Lost in Translation. It depicts phalanxes of troops moving with deliberate, terrifying fervor across the very wide screen.

And this time Tom Cruise, the can-do idol of millions, uses his polished-chrome smile mirthlessly. At least for the first hour, his grin looks like a faded tattoo. The uneven Samurai is a can-do movie that's far more effective at communicating emotion in bigger scenes than in more intimate ones.

Cruise plays Nathan Algren, a burned-out former Army officer and Indian fighter. Having survived Custer's Last Stand in 1876, he is now a commercial sideshow prop, demonstrating the newest Winchester rifle. As Algren lumbers through the cliches he's hired to recite before blasting away at targets -- though the whiskey oozing from his pores probably makes him more of a danger than the weapon -- a sudden ember of regret flames in this ex-soldier's eyes. He goes off the script, reciting the horrors of a campaign in which he and his troops slaughtered innocents.

Algren looks so wasted and beleaguered that the biggest question is not whether he'll wing an audience member with a stray shot, but whether he can bear up under the dense, cast-iron plot. After being bounced by the Winchester folks, Algren is hired by his former commander, Colonel Bagley (Tony Goldwyn, playing a salamander-like ancestor of all the sleazy characters he's ever portrayed). Bagley wants Algren to travel with him to Tokyo and train Japanese soldiers in the use of American tactics and rifles. The Meiji emperor is ready to accept the ways of the West; he's actually being pressured to by American business interests.

Once in Japan, Algren is forced to send his nervous, underprepared imperial troops into battle too soon against an enemy of the emperor, the samurai Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe). Despite the imperial army's modern weapons, Katsumoto and his men sweep in with ferocity and wield their arms of the past -- swords and spears -- with lethal effectiveness. The cinematographer, John Toll, films their arrival through a thick fog in a forest, as if Katsumoto's men were ghosts from the recent past out to rob Algren's troops of their backbones -- and their lives.

In their ritual armor, Katsumoto's men make quick work of their foes; there's tragicomic relief as Algren's conscripted farmers tremble while trying to load their guns. When a wounded Algren kills Katsumoto's second in command, he's captured by the invaders and, even more bewildering, cared for by Katsumoto's sister, Taka (Koyuki), the widow of the man Algren murdered.

It's a complicated story, and Zwick is complicated, too: he loves arrogance slapped out of its self-regard. Algren is full of himself, even though he's conceived as a man who was second tenor to a legend; he knew and despised Custer. Looking fashionably distressed, with slightly puffy, red-rimmed eyes that at the very least suggest that he's survived a grueling press junket, Cruise has a worn cockiness. His aw-shucks virility is a little wilted, if not mildewed, around the edges: a kind of reverse narcissism, since Algren is proud of his dissolution (though Cruise's good-boy posture works for a man reared under the disciplinary rigors of the military).