About.com Rating

Publisher's Site

The third Rurouni Kenshin standalone feature is the least impressive of the three, a movie-length episode from the series that is entertaining enough but doesn’t achieve much more than that. Fans of the series are the main audience for the film; most anyone walking in cold is likely to be bewildered and disappointed. And even the fans may want to take a miss.

Pros:

• Incrementally better animation than its TV counterpart.

Cons:

• Repetitive pacing pads out the running time.
• Storyline adds up to little more than an extended two-part episode of the TV series.

• Director: Hatsuki Tsuji
• Animation Studio: Studio DEEN
• Released By: SPE Visual Works
• Released Domestically By: Aniplex
• Audio: Japanese w/English subtitles
• Age Rating: TV-MA (violence, blood, thematic material)
• List Price: $69.98 / ¥8,000 (BD / Import only)

Anime Genres:

• Samurai
• Action
• Drama

Related Titles:

• Rurouni Kenshin

Yet another blast from Kenshin's past

The previous two Kenshin OAVs, Seisou-hen and Tsuioku-hen were both closely tied into—what else?—wandering swordsman Kenshin’s past as an assassin, and so RK:TMP kicks off with a flashback that employs the same plot device. Back in the days when Kenshin was a killer in the service of the anti-Shogunate forces, he clashed with one Shigure Takimi, a loyalist—killing one of Shigure’s closefriends, Takatsuki Gentatsu. Shigure has burned for revenge ever since—so much so that the film itself flashes back compulsively to this scene again and again, so many times that it begins to seem like a shameless way to pad out the running time to a full ninety minutes.

Years later, with the Shogunate out of power, Shigure is still alive—as is Kenshin—and the two discover each other one day on the streets of Yokohama quite by accident. The whole way this happens is straight out of the show’s playbook of low comedy, where Kenshin and his friends—brawler Sanosuke, in particular—break up a fight (or maybe instigate a whole new one, depending on how you look at it) on the boardwalk. They rescue a young woman, Toki, from the hands of a harassing gang—and that’s also when Shigure encounters Kenshin again for the first time in years. Toki, you see, is Gentatsu’s sister, and Shigure has been watching over Toki since her brother’s death at the hands of Kenshin himself.

Shigure’s vendetta is not even with Kenshin specifically, but rather with the new government that has risen in place of the Shogunate. He is quietly gathering together an army to rise up against them—one fueled by the new government’s own weapons, cleverly stolen from them under their own noses. Eventually it falls to Kenshin to stop this insurrection from taking root. This may prove difficult given that he has never taken an oath to kill, and his opponent(s) are more than willing to shed any amount of blood to get their way.

Kenshin's native charm can't overcome this movie's flaws

There are so many individual things wrong with RK:TMP that itemizing them would quickly become redundant. The endless re-use of the same flashback to Kenshin and Gentatsu crossing swords that first time quickly becomes a joke. Kaoru ends up being marginalized and underused—although, in some sense, that could be little more than the logical continuation of the same shameful treatment she received in the TV series. The writing for the main characters in general (save for Kenshin) is underwhelming. And because the whole thing’s a self-contained enterprise, all the real character growth and development is reserved for the one-shot characters—Shigure and Toki, mainly, who are interesting to watch even while we know we’ll never see either of them again.

While the movie has slightly better production values than the show itself—its animation style and art direction actually hew far closer to the TV series than the two OVAs did—it’s not dramatic enough a leap to feel like a full-blown theatrical film. Apart from a few really stylish action scenes (like that endlessly overplayed Kenshin/Gentatsu fight), the biggest difference between this and the TV series is the fact that the movie’s widescreen and the TV series wasn’t. It looks and plays like an overblown episode of the TV series, in more ways than one.

This issue seems endemic to movie spin-offs derived from TV shows. Similar movies created from Naruto and Fullmetal Alchemist have suffered from the same problems. On the other hand, Eden of the East’s two movie sequels were direct, canonized extensions of the original storyline; whatever their flaws, they were at least proper continuations of the story and not simply self-contained digressions.

The end result is something that’ll sit best with existing Kenshin fans. And even that’s a bit dubious, given how the movie mostly uses the Kenshin characters and setting for a story with minimal weight. Yes, the Shigure / Toki portion of the story is decently done and helps supply what heft the movie does have to spare, but it’s all plowed under by the rest of the film’s featherweight approach.

Publisher's Site

Disclosure: A review copy was purchased by the reviewer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.