Rurouni Kenshin 3: The Legend Ends

The first (and best) film in the Japanese ‘Kenshin the Wanderer’ trilogy introduced us to Takeru Satô’s soft-spoken protagonist, a rebel killer who has helped to bring down the feudal era in nineteenth-century Japan, but since renounced violence for the sake of a better society.

Both the ‘Tokyo Inferno’ follow-up and this closing chapter form a separate continuous narrative, however, wherein a former assassin gathers a private army to overthrow the new regime, and Kenshin must stop him without breaking his vow never to kill again. With so much backstory involved, ‘The Legend Ends’ isn’t the best starting point for newcomers – in fact, it’s the weakest of the three movies.

Satô’s enigmatic man-apart turn works as well as ever, and the expert swordplay is impressive. Yet in trying to top everything else thus far, the filmmakers overreach themselves in a less-than-exciting grand finale aboard an armoured battleship menacing Tokyo. A disappointing conclusion to a series which, at its best, has dashingly revived the samurai genre for modern audiences.