Rurôni Kenshin: Densetsu no saigo-hen (2014)
Shishio has set sail in his ironclad ship to bring down the Meiji government and return Japan to chaos, carrying Kaoru with him. In order to stop him in time, Kenshin trains with his old master to learn his final technique.
Director:
Keishi OhtomoWriters:
Nobuhiro Watsuki (manga), Kiyomi Fujii(screenplay)Stars:
Tatsuya Fujiwara, Takeru Satô, Min Tanaka |Story line
Shishio has set sail in his ironclad ship to bring down the Meiji government and return Japan to chaos, carrying Kaoru with him. In order to stop him in time, Kenshin trains with his old master to learn his final technique.
It's rather hard to describe how much of a massively disappointing final act in the live-action Kenshin trilogy this film is. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that the people who made the second film had nothing to do with it. After the second film (the first half of the Kyoto Arc) had been brought to life so brilliantly, it's hard to see how they could have dropped the ball this badly for the third film.
For starters, it takes about 90 minutes for it to finally get moving, most of that devoted to Kenshin learning the final technique he needs to defeat Shishio (the main villain). The problem is, the anime and the manga don't take anywhere near that long to tell this part of the story, so why they felt the need to stretch it out to death is a complete mystery. This ends up wasting precious time, which in turn left them little choice but to cut out most of the important events that lead up to the final fight, basically rewriting a huge chunk of the story. Instead, what we get is a bloated action sequence in the third act that tries to smush several of the fights together, chopping them down to mere fragments of what they should have been.
This also calls up a pretty big plot hole. The main villain's guards are known as the "Ten Swords." In these two films combined, we see our heroes defeat four of them. I guess the other six took a vacation, or were completely forgotten about by the filmmakers. The final fight with Shishio is appropriately epic (though stretched out a little too much to the point of monotony), but it does nothing to make up for the film's major shortcomings. I'll end this rant here, but I will add that I really hope they try again in the future. They wouldn't even have to redo the whole thing, just this one film, if only so fans can have the great finale that this story deserves.