Buckle up, readers, it’s hot take time. Yojimbo is a classic Akira Kurosawa samurai movie, breezier and less dramatic than most of his filmography but just as gorgeous and obviously made with just as much care and attention. The story is precisely assembled but not unnecessarily embellished — a mysterious stranger wanders into a town in conflict and both sides seek his help. It’s been endlessly adapted and remade, sometimes into fantastic movies (A Fistful of Dollars), sometimes into much less fantastic ones (Last Man Standing). But the remakes often miss something that lies at the heart of the original. Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name is scruffy but cool, invincible, an iconic anti-hero. Bruce Willis’s character in Last Man Standing is stoic and kind of boring. But the nameless ronin protagonist of Yojimbo (played by legendary Japanese actor and frequent Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune) is broke, dirty, a comic figure, capable of eruptions of wild and transfixing violence. I put it to you that Yojimbo is an action-comedy, maybe the first ever, with a geneology leading less toward the solemn murder-heroes of the movies that would follow it and more towards Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop and others. Mifune is no comedian by trade, but his character work is flawless, and the movie recognizes that the situation he finds himself in is often quite funny.