4 out of 5

Directed by: Kan Eguchi

Although you can sense the source material fueling its visuals – characters with backgrounds that exist offscreen; clear refrence callout visuals and asides – Kan Eguchi’s adaptation of Katsuhisa Minami’s series is never too winky or exclusionary in its approach. If anything, while some motivations arrive a bit underbaked, the fact that the actors embodied those offscreen notes provides the viewer with confidence that this all makes sense, even if the explanations are neither explicit or implicit in the script. And visually, Eguchi is reaching on occasion for a chaos and fluidity the live action may not ever be able to really capture, but the spirit is alive and the editing is in service of making it all feel like stuff is happening in a “logical” way, making for a nice magic trick: even when the screen is cluttered, or the logic of how we got from action A to action B is a bit fuzzy, you’re locked in and having fun the whole way.

Jun’ichi Okada plays Akira Sato, aka the titular Fable – a nom de plume for the assassin role Sato undertakes for the underworld. Accompanied by his “sister” Yoko (Fumino Kimura), who acts as a bit of a coordinator for his jobs, Sato is allowed the indulgence of being… pretty weird, because he’s so damn good. An opening sequence of grand slaughter is made somewhat cartoonish (and a bit clunky) by on-screen flashes of calculations of bullet trajectory “The Fable” is mentally doing, such that he can take out multiple targets with one bullet, and do lots of fancy gun-kata to never get hit but keep on hitting; immediately afterwards, he’s normal ol’ Sato again, where normal means Akira swaps between dialects and personas by tapping his forehead and resetting himself; where his emotional responses are practically nil, except for uncontrollable at a childish television comedian, and incredible sensitivity to food that his any warmer than room temperature. In a different type of film, this would probably be played up in a bit more of an autistic angle, but flashbacks fill us in on Sato’s raising, and we piece together that a particular isolating youth alongside particular personality quirks produced the “friendly” assassin with which we’re presented.

All the same, it’s time to lay low: Sato is commanded to do his normal persona for a year; that is: don’t kill anyone. Sato undertakes this as a job: to be normal, and is immediately tested by being in the middle of a powerplay amongst the Osaka yakuza, trying to protect / fight / keep alive the detestable Kojima (Yûya Yagira), the calculating Sunagawa (Osamu Mukai), and also fending off an “I’d love to be killed by you” obsession from less friendly assassin, Fudo (Sôta Fukushi). A friendship with coworker Misaki (Mizuki Yamamoto) gets thrown into the mix, forcing Sato to consider what it means to do something because you want to or because you enjoy it, and not just because it’s a job.

Fudo’s brutality is played up in a comically overviolent way that doesn’t quite sync with the movie’s tone otherwise, but Fukushi – as with the other actors – makes it work; Yamamoto has the most emotional arc, Misaki swept up in yakuza business but trying to maintain her normal life otherwise, interestingly anchored by Sato’s plain-faced dealings with her – their characters smartly reflecting one another – and Kimura knows to way overplay Yoko in order to balance out has purposefully bland Sato tends to be. But: Okada adds much to that blandness. As mentioned, the “easier” way out of a character like this is to make Sato’s assassin prowess a type of superpower, which it is – it’s very unreal – but you can see a thinking creature behind the actions and calculations. It’s a great, subtle (in his “human” life, and excepting when he’s childishly laugh at fart jokes on TV) performance.

The music, playlisted with a lot of 90s sounding rockers, gives the move a throwback vibe to before John Wicks and CGI; the action can be a bit blustery – sound and fury with not much happening – but on the whole, it’s executed with such charm that you don’t have the bandwidth to think about it too much.

A great action movie that legitimately has some heart, and uses instead of abuses its source material to let its script / visuals embrace the world that exists offscreen.