4 out of 5

Directed by: Kan Eguchi

A more confident followup to the wildly entertaining ‘The Fable,’ subtitled sequel ‘The Fable: The Killer Who Doesn’t Kill’ is able to add in some storyline complexity by giving titular assassin-on-a-killing-break Sato (Junichi Okada) with a mission of redemption, but the connection to the “no killing” motivation isn’t quite as clear or necessary here, and there’s a surprising lack of continuation on dangling ideas / threads from film 1. Thankfully, director Kan Eguchi has upped the action game to nail-biting extremes in some particular opening and climactic sections, and with co-writer Masahiro Yamaura, finds a solid sense of pacing and tone from the humor, quirk, and drama to all work in concert; combined with another winning set of cast members, it’s a sum-is-greater-than experience, with the movie’s 2 hour runtime speeding by and entertaining us well past some clear gaps.

The aforementioned opening gives us a truly death-defying chase sequence that features a Fable-looking type taking out several thugs, which presumably – since there’s killing – places us somewhere else in the timeline; indeed, we’ll return to this later. In the meantime, Sato is still at work at his greeting card company, unaware of being crushed on by Misaki (Mizuki Yamamoto), and maintaining his cover as someone “normal.”

A delivery brings him into proximity of a familiar face from his past: philanthropist Utsubo (Shin’ichi Tsutsumi) is a pretty bad dude in his spare time, and Fable recalls an unfulfilled contract between the two. Wrapped up in this is the contract killer working for Utsubo, Suzuki (Masanobu Andô), and a young, wheelchair-bound girl in their charge, Hinako (Yurina Hirate). Against his sister’s (Fumino Kimura) advice, Fable feels his owes it to Utsubo – in one way or another – to finish up their business.

The relationship between Utsubo, Suzuki, and Hinako is where the movie bites off a bit more than it can chew, showing the difficulty of adapting material with a lot more story than can fit into two hours, and thus kind of shallowly having to draw up Utsubo as the worst type of creep, and Suzuki being bound to both his boss and charge by a sense of honor. However, Tsutsumi plays an excellent creep, and makes the sociopathic jump between caring public figure and closeted killer incredibly believable, even if his exact schemes are never… all that clear. Similarly, Andô is a great pairing against Okada, both playing variations of silent-but-deadly types of different stripes, and Kimura is able to get much more in the mix as a capable killer herself, and both her athleticism and the humor she brings to the role are spot on. Lastly, it would’ve been pretty easy for Hirate to play Hinako as a pretty stereotyped damsel, but – like Okada – gives us so much behind the character’s eyes; Eguchi (and editor Tsuyoshi Imai) smartly give us a lot of time to sit with these characters between action scenes, and though some reviewers have noted it as downtime, I think it alternatively gave the story more weight than it might’ve otherwise had on its surface.

The Fable: The Killer Who Doesn’t Kill is more complex, if maybe less “logical” beat by beat than its precedent, but knows how / when to go bigger and better where it matters to make it a different and rewarding experience.