“Revenge is an act of style.”

Bunraku is the most stylized movie I’ve seen in a while.

What do you get when you cross a bunch of bizarrely placed actors, a blender-bomb mix of influence, style, and tecnique, an archetypal revenge story with bromance thrown in for kicks, and a series of inventive fights that are the best of their kind since Kill Bill?

Bunraku is what you get, apparently. And it’s not a movie that people are going to notice let alone rush out and see. That’s a shame for the kind of eclectic geek it was made by and for, for whom this type of thing is like catnip. It’s probably a wise move by everyone else because five seconds of Kevin McKidd fight-dancing with his stick and scarf will be enough to turn them off.

For what’s it worth, I fall more into the former category. That isn’t to say that Bunraku doesn’t err on the side of its own lunacy and ambition at times (the narration isn’t always great and the narrator himself is actually fairly bad). For the most part, its flaws are part and parcel with its commitment to the colorful, improbably, and kinetic world in which its story is set. That story is nothing too amazing. It’s a familar East-meets-West revenge tale in which the two main characters are actually a samurai and a cowboy. Of course, the twist is that Bunraku takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where any weapon including and beyond firearms is outlawed and martial arts melees reign supreme. So it’s a cowboy without a gun and a samurai with no sword (well, for most of the movie).