The Fable is a 2019 action comedy about a genius assassin forced to live a year of normal life but gets dragged into a whirlwind of chaos involving the Osaka underworld.
From Fantasia Festival 2019: The Fable is the nickname of a genius assassin (Jun’ichi Okada) at the center of this movie, who, after a particularly brutal job, is forced to take a year off to live as a normal person, something that he has never done before. All he has ever known is to be a killer. Paired up in disguise with his partner as his sister, he is ordered to give it all up for a year. No killing. Things go well at first as he awkwardly tries to adapt, find a job and then meets a nice girl, Misaki (Mizuki Yamamoto) who he is interested until she gets caught in the middle of an underworld clash for power. More concerning are the two young assassins on a hunt to take his title.
Wrapped up in his lifestyle as an assassin, Akira Sato, as he’s known while undercover, has weird habits, like sleeping naked in the bathtub and disguising his bed, for example. In fact, he is naked doing a lot of things. It’s not easy being normal. It doesn’t help that he has these odd tastes in what is funny and he is so calm and collected that everything he does has him in total control. And this is where there movie gets it right, the fighting scenes fun both in creativity and style, though the heart of the story is in how it deals with old fish out of water angle. Plenty of dark humor and earned slapstick comedy find their marks.
There’s loads of hand-to-hand combat and fast paced gun fights with more than enough action to keep it impressive, the opening scenes setting the tone for what’s to come. It all leads to a final act that’s a spectacle on a massive scale that will more than keep fans of such happy.
Taking home the Fantasia Best Action Film Award, The Fable is a good time at the movies. Junichi Okada delivers as do the two assassins, their continuously shifting change in character making them so much fun. Some might quibble with a few flaws, with some truly over the top characters that are well, a little too over-the-top, not to mention an overabundance of people to keep track of, making it a little hard to follow sometimes. All this is easy to look past though because The Fable is well-paced, has great comedic timing and genuinely entertainingly action.