Rurouni Kenshin Part II: Kyoto Inferno (2014)

Kyoto Inferno arrives as the second installment of a trilogy adapted from a manga that ran for years and sold in quantities that make most Western franchises look modest. Kenshin, a reformed assassin with a reversed blade and a vow against killing, is dispatched by the Meiji government to stop a former colleague named Shishio, who survived being set on fire and has decided to burn the country down in return. The plot involves a broken sword, a kidnapped infant, a ninja innkeeper, and roughly four hundred fights. It is, in other words, a story about revenge and the difficulty of refusing it.

The film contains no detectable trace of contemporary social messaging. The cast is Japanese because the story is Japanese and the production was Japanese. Women wield blades and opinions, and nobody pauses to congratulate the screenplay for it. Shishio's grievance is with a government that betrayed him, not with capital, and the Meiji setting serves as a backdrop for swordplay instead of a platform for commentary on the present. Nobody lectures. Nobody explains the moral of a scene after the scene has ended. The film trusts the audience to infer that killing is bad from the fact that everyone who does it looks miserable.

This is either a limitation or a relief, depending on the viewer's appetite for instruction. As a piece of cultural accounting, the film registers as a zero across every modern ledger we maintain, which is not a criticism so much as an observation about what a 2014 Japanese action picture was built to do. It was built to be watched. It succeeds. There is a certain melancholy in noting how rare that has become.