I really enjoyed the characters and world of Demon Slayer in the first season of the anime. So imagine my confusion when I was watching this movie and it wasn’t grabbing me for at least 2/3 of it.

Unfortunately, I think it’s hard to describe why I didn’t care for it in a way that’s both satisfying enough to give you an idea why, yet vague enough to allow you to go in as blind as I would want you to. It’s a tough choice, but I’ll stick with being vague. Odds are you’ll want to see it regardless since I appear to be the odd rating out. So I think the most I can do is hope to lower any expectations just in case it doesn’t grab you, too.

I think the simplest word to describe the movie is “boring” — and that’s certainly not what you want a 2 hour movie to be described as. The initial concept of the movie seemed like it would allow for a deep look at the characters, but all of it is either uninteresting or inconsequential. A demon’s power seemed like it was going to use the train in an interesting way, but instead its power ended up being very generic. I was really just waiting for these parts to either get interesting or end, and it took a good while. To be fair, there were cool, interesting, or funny bits sprinkled around, but I don’t think they were good enough to warrant sitting through everything else.

But that’s the first 2/3. Closer to the end was a whole chunk of the movie that reminded me of the Demon Slayer I watched before. It pains me that I can’t go into detail, but if you end up sitting there not enjoying the movie like I was, then it’s good to know there might be something to look forward to.

I don’t think anything represents this noticeable split in interest better than the fiery poster boy himself: Kyojuro Rengoku. If you watched this movie hoping to see what the deal with the Flame Hashira is, you’ll only be half disappointed. The first stretch of the movie mainly focuses on Tanjiro (Inosuke also gets some nice attention!) with relatively small amounts of Rengoku. Rengoku does some things, but in this first part a lot of him being cool was done with telling rather than showing. It gets pretty frustrating, especially when you want to see him be an overpowered Hashira.

But he does finally get the spotlight, and incidentally this is the chunk of the movie I liked. Unfortunately nothing too mindblowing happens during it and his quirkiness from the beginning of the movie doesn’t return. But it was interesting and it had a positive thought about what it means to be human. After the lengthy parts of the movie that came before it, it was refreshing. But the problem is…sitting through the lengthy parts of movie that came before it.

Overall, I think this is a movie you could skip if you aren’t still interested in the details of what happens during it. Granted, I’m not entirely sure how much it’s referenced later on since I haven’t read the manga, but it felt like a “sidequest” kind of story. Despite it being 2 hours long, you could probably have your friend describe it to you in 2 minutes and get just as much out of it.