Based on a megahit manga by Watsuki Nobuhiro, Otomo Keishi’s fantasy swashbuckler has a lot of fans to please, but it also tries to draw in non-fans with a stand-alone story and plenty of dynamically staged action scenes. That is, even if your acquaintance with the reformed assassin hero and his world are zero, you won’t be baffled – or bored. He is Himura Kenshin (Sato Takeru), nicknamed Hitokiri Battosai, a former assassin who vowed to kill no more following the long struggle to overthrow the old Shogunal government, in which he fought on the winning side. When we meet him in 1878, a decade after that struggle ended, he is still slight and boyish-looking compared with the tough ronin (masterless samurai) roaming the streets, but is more than their match when it comes to swordplay, even though the lethal side of his weapon has been reversed (samurai swords are sharp on one side only). Then Kenshin encounters Kamiya Kaoru (Takei Emi), who has taken over her dead father’s kendo school in Tokyo and faces two problems bigger than she can handle.
First, a mysterious swordsman who also calls himself Battosai and claims to be of her father’s school is slashing and killing random people. (Such slayings of the lower orders by samurai were once allowed as privilege of rank, but not in the new enlightened era.) Second, a woman doctor named Megumi (Aoi Yu) has taken refuge at the dojo after escaping from the clutches of Takeda Kanryu (Kagawa Teruyuki), a conniving, bombastic merchant who forced her to develop a new type of opium he intends to use to accumulate even more money and power. When Kanryu sends his minions after Megumi, Kaoru, who is no superwoman, can’t stop them alone. Naturally, Kenshin steps in to help her, with the aid of Sagara Sanosuke (Aoki Munetaka), another fighter on the margins of society, if on the side of justice. Neither of their opponents are pushovers, however: Kanryu calls on hundreds of starving ronin to his defense, while Battosai commands powers that approach the supernatural. Runouni Kenshin may be entertainment of the manga-esque kind, with the characters who are larger than life, but it also reflects the chaos of the era, when the ways of the samurai were dying and a new modernizing, Westernizing age was dawning. Furthermore, its action sequences, choreographed by Hong-Kong-trained veteran Tanigaki Kenji, are both big in scale and, despite the film’s kid-targeted source material, relatively realistic. The actors and stuntmen get a thorough, bruising, workout, though no on-screens lives are lost. Kenshin must be the hardest-fighting pacifist since the Lone Ranger.
Mark Schilling