Pour yourself a stiff drink and take a gander at the slate of scheduled releases for 2016. If we were to cut out the nonsense subtitles and replace them with their rightful numerical ordering, we’d see that the dog days of summer alone will bring us Now You See Me 2, Neighbors 2, Tim Burton’s Version Of Alice In Wonderland 2, Michael Bay’s Version Of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, The Conjuring 2, Finding Nemo 2, Independence Day 2, The Purge 3, Ice Age 5, X-Men 8 Kinda If You Count The Solo Movies, and Captain America 3, which also acts as Iron Man 4. And that’s not factoring in the hotly anticipated God’s Not Dead 2, which will be handed to your local god-fearing cineplex down from on high come April.
The American film landscape inches closer and closer to critical sequel mass with every new tentpole season, and it’s because of this, not in spite of it, that we should deliberately maintain an appreciation for how good franchise filmmaking can be. There are loads of counterexamples to disprove the alleged intrinsic evil of the sequel, from Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather follow-up all the way down to Spider-Man 2’s infinitesimal improvements over the first. In fact, in theory, a sequel should be better than the film that preceded it; the creative parties responsible have had time to reflect on which aspects did and did not work, and how they can rectify any bugs in the original. Studios wouldn’t make sequels if people didn’t want ‘em, and people wouldn’t want ‘em if they didn’t satisfy some base need for more of what pleases us. In the best cases, this results in all-killer no-filler sequels that ditch the extraneous material and play up the components audiences love; in the worst cases, the attempt to be one of the best cases engenders shameless pandering and an over-reliance on simple recognition in place of whatever magic made the original a hit big enough to merit a second film.
Because, after all, it is a sort of magic that turns a film into a crowd-pleasing box-office smash. The qualities that make a picture good, by anyone’s measure—brains, heart, courage, Toto—are not nearly as easy to isolate and replicate as, say, a snappy soundbite or memorable action setpiece. A good sequel needs something to say, and the know-how to say it well. This self-knowledge is exactly what makes Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance (newly available on DVD and Blu-ray via Criterion, along with the 1973 original) the Platonic ideal of the franchise sequel. The two films, both excellent in their own right, function precisely as a surprise blockbuster and its younger sibling ought to, continuing to deliver the goods while simultaneously challenging their core audience. Love Song of Vengeance—a subtitle so damn cool that it justifies its own use—is the perfect antidote to Franchise Fatigue, a hypodermic needle straight to the heart that jump-starts the appreciation for sequels as a unique form deserving of consideration and respect.
The chanbara classic Lady Snowblood is, all cultural context aside, a superhero movie. In the role of her career, Meiko Kaji imbued Yuki Kashima, a.k.a. remorseless killer Lady Snowblood, with ferocious life, and then provided her with the other essential components any good superhero needs. There’s the magnificent name, but she’s also got a tragic backstory befitting the crusaders of Marvel and DC (Mom died during childbirth while serving a prison sentence for killing the rapist with whom she conceived Yuki), extraordinary skill of mind and body honed through a childhood spent training as a killing machine, and a righteous streak guiding her on her mission of revenge. Everything about her exudes cool—the spatter of Day-Glo fake blood on her immaculate white kimono inspired rapture in a young Quentin Tarantino, who drew heavily from Toshiya Fujita’s film while working on his own Kill Bill two-parter. (The character of O-Ren Ishii is pretty much a modern-day version of Yuki.) Audiences in Japan clamored for another adventure with this breakout sensation, and the fine folks at Toho Studios would’ve been crazy not to address that demand.
The producers’ first wise move was keeping on director Fujita and his trusty director of photography, Masaki Tamura—audiences intuitively understand that a Lady Snowblood movie is not merely a film that features Kaji splitting dudes in half with a katana, but a film that looks and moves in a fashion similar to the original. The Lady Snowblood franchise forged a distinctive aesthetic identity for itself through consistent use of stylistic flourishes like dramatic light-shadow contrast, and snow as a sort of visual filter to absorb and refract color and light. As flurries of punches tear across the screen, Fujita and Tamura splash dreamlike color onto the frame like paint onto a canvas. But their true brilliance is evident in their careful negotiation of maintaining the identifiable Lady Snowblood brand while also expanding outward, becoming bigger and better.
Love Song of Vengeance opens with an unusual action sequence, the sort of stylistic risk that a director in his second installment of a series should feel comfortable making. As she treads along a beach’s shoreline, a gaggle of unnamed assailants descend on Yuki, and the way she dispatches them can only be described as “uninterested.” Without looking any of them in the eye, she kills several and continues walking, completely unfazed. They eventually overtake her, but she seems at most indifferent to her own capture, and the rambling tracking shot that follows her down the beach supports this sense of looseness and spontaneity in the combat. The scene fascinates both with and without knowledge of the goings-on in the previous film; new viewers are drawn in by a fight scene that nearly takes place in spite of itself, and the initiated understand the depths of Yuki’s alienation from the world around her following the traumas of the first film.
Love Song of Vengeance also reframes the central driving conflict of the franchise to create something fresh that ultimately enriches the character of Yuki. Just as Spider-Man pitted Peter Parker against the nefarious Green Goblin while Spider-Man 2 pitted him against himself as well as Doc Ock, Love Song of Vengeance moves the conflict from the external to the internal. (In case it’s not clear, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man is the measuring stick by which we should be judging all franchise movies. First movie: solid introduction. Second movie: complicate your hero. Third movie: go completely bananas and cackle as your franchise goes up in flames.) The head of the Secret Police offers Yuki clemency if she’ll play spy for the local government and infiltrate a group of underground anarchists. Yuki’s good for it, but once she’s gone undercover, she begins to question who’s really in the right—call it Point Breaking, if you feel so inclined. Transitioning from hero-against-the-world to hero-against-tricky-ethical-concerns isn’t the most complicated transition for a franchise to make, but it remains a potent one because it satisfies the audience’s need for more while showing them things they never even thought to want.
A franchise doesn’t have to devolve into repetition or blatant audience reacharounds on a long enough timeline. Hell, they made 26 features around popular Japanese swordsman Zatoichi, and even at their worst, they were still pretty good. Or for a more familiar instance of healthy longevity, how about James Bond? Twenty-four movies in, and each one is still greeted with feverish anticipation and makes dump-truck-loads of money. This is because whenever 007’s movies start to flag (and oh, they have flagged hard) they can dynamite the premise and start again with a new look, a new creative team, and a new set of ideas. Essentially, they have the freedom to try new things while remaining safely under the franchise banner, reinventing whatever might malfunction while holding onto the central aspects of the series that first endeared it to audiences. The creators of Lady Snowblood and Love Song of Vengeance had a Zenlike knack for striking this balance, expanding the walls of their wheelhouse rather than languishing within it. Only long-retired Toho heads will understand why they never greenlit a third Lady Snowblood picture; if there was ever a property deserving of sequels into perpetuity, it was this one.
