White dude who happens to be an already impressively trained warrior with extensive expertise in hand-to-hand combat, and war in general, arrives and gets his ass kicked repeatedly, brutally, for months until he finally learns to defend himself just a little bit.
The whole reason Algren was selected for his "mission" was that he was a warrior of great renown who was literally a living legend for his "heroic" (read: actually barbaric, insanely violent) exploits.
There are a lot of Hollywood movies that have serious problems with 'white savior' tropes and intentional/unintentional racism in how they depict their white characters interacting with other cultures. While The Last Samurai isn't perfect in this regard, I found it to be a lot more aware, and respectful, of those issues than most any other movie you could reasonably paint with this brush. Cruise's character isn't a white savior, he's painted from the opening scenes as a brutal savage who is responsible for countless atrocities against Native Americans, and someone we should rightfully despise.
I think the bigger problem with this movie is its whitewashing of Japanese history in general, painting the samurai as noble rebels fighting to preserve important Japanese tradition against an oppressive, tyrannical government, when the reality is that they just didn't want to give up their positions of power and privilege. By having the Meiji Restoration beseech someone like Algren to join their cause in the first place, the movie immediately paints them inaccurately and unfairly as villains trying to oppress people, and the samurai as saviors. My limited understanding of the history tells me the reality was quite different.
The tone-deafness of the movie is that it's a decidedly American interpretation of Japanese history and events with no real respect for the accuracy of that history or the people involved. Hollywood romanticizes samurai, so we got a movie romanticizing them without any respect given to reality.
