Ever had one of those days where you were sifting through Netflix and surely enough you came across something you were bound to be interested in only before you kept scrolling?
Yeah…me too. Only, I can affirm you that this won’t be the case with Kan Eguchi’s 2019 action comedy adaptation, The Fable, which I reviewed that year for its NYAFF premiere. The same goes for its most recent sequel which I also reviewed and well… the rest is history. As much as I and others have been jib-jabbin’ away about these back-to-back hit films and wondering just when the rest of the world would see them, it turns out that Netflix has acquired and listed BOTH titles on its Coming Soon tab with a date set for November 17!
The Fable is based on Katsuhisa Minami’s 2014 manga of the same name and stars Junichi Okada as an infamous and almost folkloric killer, forced out in the open when gangland upheaval pulls him out of his mandatory retirement. The sequel – The Fable: The Killer Who Does’t Kill – which released in June after a protracted local delay in Japan due to the pandemic, sees our title would-be hero protecting a paraplegic who gets caught up in an NPO scheme that envelopes his place of employment into a dark frenzy.
Joining Okada between both films is a cast that respectively includes Fumino Kimura, Koichi Sato, Ken Yasuda, Mizuki Yamamoto, Jiro Sato, Masao Yoshii and Yuya Yagira, along with Osamu Mukai and Sota Fukushi, Yurina Hirate, Shinichi Tsutsumi, Jun Kurose and Masanobu Ando, and prominently featuring Okada in fine fashion, topped with some of the tightest action sequences ever shot on film.
I’m glad I caught this today. I’ve been in a rut dealing with some serious health issues lately, and I have Japanese action cinema to thank for this energy I’m feeling now. It’s great, really.
Catch up here and here, and don’t forget to read my NYAFF reviews linked above!
