If a samurai film can be judged by its final battle, then 13 Assassins is easily one of the greatest samurai flicks of all time. The movie has everything you’d expect from the genre—ritual suicide, weary ronins, feudal politics, warriors hungry for a noble death—but the finale is one the longest, bloodiest, craziest, and most beautifully filmed battles that you’ll see in any action film.

The plot of 13 Assassins is relatively straightforward. In the last days of Edo period Japan, the shogun is about to elevate the cruel Lord Naritsugu, a man so sadistic he makes Joffrey Lannister look like a Care Bear, to a high government post. Naritsugu has been torturing, raping, and murdering both peasants and nobles around his domain and Sir Doi, the Shogun’s Justice, realizes he’ll soon be untouchable. Sir Doi reaches out to the samurai Shinzaemon with a secret mission: assassinate Naritsugu.

Shinzaemon is convinced to take on the assignment after hearing about Naritsugu’s crimes, including a horrifying scene where a woman mutilated by Naritsugu clenches a brush in her bleeding mouth to write out what happened to her family: “total massacre.” However, Shinzaemon also can’t help but grin at the story. “As a samurai in an era of peace, I’ve been wishing for a noble death,” he says, hands trembling with anticipation.

Shinzaemon assembles and trains a group of thirteen assassins for the mission. Meanwhile, his old training partner and guard of Naritsugu, Hanbei, learns of the assassination plot. The two samurai try to outmaneuver each other, but it eventually all comes down to the film’s main event: a gigantic 45-minute battle in a small town that the assassins have boobytrapped. “We’ll transform it into a town of death,” Shinzaemon says with complete accuracy.

While the plot may be a classic story (the film is a remake of a 1963 film of the same name), director Takashi Miike works deliberately and slowly to make us actually care about the characters. Naritsugu is a truly great villain, a Japanese Caligula who looks bored while murdering children, and the tactical maneuvering in the first two-thirds is plenty interesting. The film is also gorgeous, with sweeping landscape shots and eye-catching compositions. Even in the most violent and horrifying moments—this is the director of Audition and Ichi the Killer—the movie simply looks beautiful.

Then there’s the final battle. The baker’s dozen of assassins is facing 200 soldiers, so they even the odds by rigging up the town with barricades, exploding bridges, and flaming bulls. While there’s obviously something unrealistic about thirteen samurai fighting against hundreds, Miike films the action scenes with both coherence and seriousness, avoiding the chaotic shaky cams and stunt goofiness (e.g., Legolas shield surfing) that plagues so many Hollywood action films. It’s really just a damn good battle.

13 Assassins draws inevitable comparisons to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (a small band of good samurai fight against overwhelming odds in a small town), but it is also reminiscent of the mythic power of Kobayashi’s masterful Samurai Rebellion. If you like samurai films, you won’t find a better one than 13 Assassins on Netflix.

Watch Now:

Tony Jaa Kicks and Punches Everyday Objects