Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days (2018)

Sequels arrive with an obligation to be larger, and this one meets that obligation with the grim determination of a civil servant filing paperwork. The afterlife bureaucracy of the first film returns, now outfitted with a thousand-year backstory for its three reapers, and the running time swells to one hundred and forty-one minutes. Within any given ten-minute stretch we may sit through a courtroom interrogation, a dinosaur attack, and a tearful reunion in a Goryeo-era village. The tonal whiplash is real. The spectacle is also, at intervals, genuinely impressive given the budget, which is roughly what a Hollywood production spends on craft services.

What the film does not do is lecture. Its moral framework comes from Buddhist and folkloric tradition, and its concerns are sin, memory, and the possibility of forgiveness. Nobody turns to the camera to explain what the audience should think about the world. The cast is entirely Korean because the source webtoon is Korean and the production is Korean, a fact that requires no further editorializing. Female characters appear in the ensemble, including the reaper Deok-choon, and the film lets them do their jobs without mounting an argument about it.

The result is a clean specimen, culturally speaking. There is no climate sermon, no indictment of capital, no lesson about bodies or brains or history. What we have is a very expensive, occasionally exhausting fantasy about guilt and remembrance, made for an audience that wanted spectacle and got it in bulk. The classification is straightforward, and I record it with the flat satisfaction of a sommelier tasting a wine that turns out to be exactly what the label promised. Zero. Not a drop of the modern vintages. We can almost admire the discipline.