Black Butler

2014 [JAPANESE]

Action / Adventure / Crime / Drama / Family / Fantasy / Horror / Mystery / Thriller

11
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 59% · 4 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 59% · 100 ratings
IMDb Rating 6.1/10 10 1978 2K

based on manga live action anime japanese film live action adaptation of manga

Plot summary

Set in the year 2020, following her supposed death, a young woman returns as the son of her noble family to precede the family's prestigious company, with a demon at her side to avenge her parent's murder.

Director

Kei'ichi Sato Photo
Kei'ichi Sato

Top cast

Ichirôta Miyakawa Photo
Ichirôta Miyakawa as Yuzo Shinozaki
Tomomi Maruyama Photo
Tomomi Maruyama as Akashi
Satoshi Hashimoto Photo
Satoshi Hashimoto as Munemitsu Aoki
Yu Shirota Photo
Yu Shirota as Charles Bennett Sat
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
1.07 GB
1280*714
Japanese 2.0
NR
Subtitles us   ja  
23.976 fps
1 hr 59 min
Seeds ...
2.2 GB
1920*1072
Japanese 5.1
NR
Subtitles us   ja  
23.976 fps
1 hr 59 min
Seeds ...

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by ganymedes1985 6 / 10

Fairly good acting can't save an awful story

Overly modernized in various ways, it only meets expectations when Sebastian takes out the dinner knives.
Reviewed by 3xHCCH 5 / 10

Confused and Convoluted

"Black Butler" is a beloved manga that my daughter and friends liked very much. So when a movie version came out, they were all excited to go see it. I have not read the manga "Kuroshitsuji" yet, so I felt I needed to see the film first myself before she does to see if it is okay for her age group. The local film classification board had rated it R- 13, but they had not been entirely consistent the way they classify films per appropriate age.The beginning narration sets the film in a near future time, when the world was divided into East and West. The West was headed by a Queen who sent her "watchdogs" to keep her enemies at check. In such a world, a "Demon's Curse" killer is going around killing diplomats by some sort of gruesome instant mummification process. Alarmed, the Queen chooses an orphaned aristocrat, Earl Genpo Kiyoharu, as her "watchdog" to get to the bottom of this matter. The young Earl has under his service a butler of many skills, Sebastian, who does whatever his young master wills him to. It turns out that Sebastian's talents are because of his demonic nature, for which the Earl will have to pay for with his soul. I believe that this film deviates much from the book by making Kiyoharu to be actually a girl Shiori pretending to be a boy in order to secretly exact revenge on her parents' killers. This also made it possible for a love angle to develop between master and servant, which of course was not in the original manga. The original setting in the manga was Victorian England, but here we only get the Victorian-looking grand manor and colorful gardens of the Genpo family instead.The opening sequence alone where Sebastian takes on an entire warehouse full of gangsters only with his butter knife sets the incredible whimsical tone for the whole film. There would be violent fight scenes, murder scenes, death scenes, as well as scenes of drug abuse, and the disturbing demonic subplot, which would automatically make this film rated R-16 in my book. In between these violent scenes though, the film's momentum dips a lot with long talky explanatory scenes.The acting department is on the campy side. The lead actors playing Sebastian and Kiyoharu are both androgynous-looking which seems to be the current rage among the younger generation. There was even more campy acting from the actors playing the clumsy maid Lynn and Kiyoharu's guardian, his Auntie Hanae. All the one-dimensional villains they faced also come from the same school of exaggerated campy acting.Overall, this is a confused film with a rather convoluted plot which did not have a clear direction that it wanted to take. If we were to only judge it with this film, it does make me wonder what those fans of the original manga loved in it. This film alone is occasionally entertaining anyway but it most probably could have been done or adapted much better than what came out now.
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