Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends (2014)

Plot summary (story synopsis): Kenshin ("sword heart") Himura (Takeru Satô) is washed up on shore after his failed attempt to save his girlfriend Kaoru Kamiya (Emi Takei). His old swordfighting sensei Seijuro Hiko finds him on the beach and carries him home.

After waking up, Kenshin convinces his old master to teach him the ultimate fighting technique of their style of swordsmanship, in order to defeat evil bad guy Shishio (Tatsuya Fujiwara).

Meanwhile, Shishio has been terrorizing villages along the coast, bombarding them with the cannon on his steel warship. Lacking such modern technology of their own, the government is unable to stop him. Shishio knows that he has the upper hand and pressures the government to arrest and execute Kenshin for his past crimes.

Along the way back to Tokyo, Kenshin has to fight off Aoshi Shinomori (Yûsuke Iseya). In Tokyo Kenshin is quickly arrested by government soldiers. The government pretends to execute Kenshin, but instead uses the fake execution as cover to attack Shishio and his warship. The stage is set for an epic confrontation between Kenshin and his sidekicks, and Shishio and his band of killers. 


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The Legend Ends is part two of this Rurouni Kenshin sequel. (Part one of the sequel is Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno. The first movie, Rurouni Kenshin, was released in 2012.)

It's a rather disappointing part two. Part one was almost too busy, introducing new characters left and right. But at least it was interesting. Part two is rather staid in comparison, with too much of the run time being taken up by the extended confrontation on Shishio's warship.

The many new and old characters from part one are sidelined and don't get much screen time - the exception being Aoshi and Kenshin's sensei.

The first part of the movie, with Kenshin and his sensei, isn't too bad. There is the usual mumbo jumbo about the spiritual side of fighting (for the real stuff, read Miyamoto Musashi's A Book of Five Rings), but that's not too annoying. We also get to see Kenshin as a child, how he ended up learning swordfighting from Seijuro Hiko, but that's relatively brief.

However, whatever plot there is, isn't convincing. Kenshin's fake execution doesn't seem necessary. It's the kind of gimmick that you would expect to see in a kiddie cartoon. Actually, the government doesn't need Kenshin at all. In the end, their shore-based cannon manage to sink Shishio's warship, making Kenshin's attack on the warship a wasted effort. (You could argue that the government wasn't sure that their cannon would sink the warship, but then why would they act as if Kenshin was their only hope?)

It is doubly a wasted effort because Shishio was going to die from his burn wounds anyway. Which doesn't make sense. The justification is that Shishio can't sweat because of his burns, causing him to overheat. Ummm, he can't spray water on himself? And Shishio's doctor can predict the time of his death, accurate to the minute? And Shishio jumping around and fighting doesn't dramatically shorten his life?

The whole warship scenario also isn't convincing. How did Shishio manage to get his hands on such rare and expensive technology? Where did he get trained sailors from? How about resupplies - fuel and ammunition?

The moviemakers even manage to get the warship details wrong. The cannon barrel walls are too thin, and the shells are loaded in without any propellant (the powder charge in naval guns is a separate package from the explosive shell). Ooh, you think that's too geeky? Wait till you hear that the warship has the all-big-gun design of a post-dreadnought battleship, decades before HMS Dreadnought.

The warship is like a Bond villain's ridiculous lair - magically existing in the middle of nowhere, without drawing attention to itself despite years of construction, tons of raw materials, and thousands of workers.

It's okay if you want to establish some kind of steam punk alternate history - Wild Wild West and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen succeeded in that. But you need to establish it. The Legend Ends simply plonks down a warship and expects us to believe that the bad guy - with no obvious sources of wealth or naval piracy capability - owns it, while the government doesn't have their own.

This isn't nit-picking. Taking too many liberties with common sense, throws the audience out of the story. Like Fox Mulder, we want to believe, but we don't want moviemakers to treat us like fools. 

But more damning is the emphasis on fights over characters. Where is the backstory for the creepily-polite Sojiro? Part one was worth the price of the ticket. Part two is not.