Filmmaker Waller is here trying to have things both ways: to pay a sincere tribute to the classic Japanese samurai movies in the widescreen frames and spurting blood it borrows, and also to make a genuine thing, a samurai qua samurai picture.

More tedious than it needed to be, Lone Samurai is an utterly predictable dud about a samurai stranded on an island with cannibals who want to kill him. The unrealistic fight scenes have adequate choreography, but the movie is idiotic.

Slogs forward as the samurai wanders aimlessly across the island before being captured by a band of cartoonishly evil natives. The story is stitched together so sloppily that there's no tension, no momentum -- just dead air between swings of the blade.

A fitfully effective genre exercise that’s saved by compositional care and worthwhile, if not exceptional, action choreography.