When you see 16-year-old Yuji Itadori at the top of GKids’ latest theatrical compilation/season 3 preview spectacular for Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution, what you witness is a hero at the end of his rope, curled up in the fetal position in a crater where a city once stood, clawing at the ground until his nails bleed, crying in anguish over the thousands of lives lost, not directly by his hands, but by the ancient demon who possessed him.
Still, recalling his grandfather’s dying words warning him not to die alone as he did, Yuji hopes to either miraculously save as many lives as he feels responsible for taking or die on the spot. It’s a lot of heavy emotions you can feel the brush of, but not the full brunt, and you hope the upcoming 90-minute film will give you a place to put those emotions, clearing away the fog of war and revealing what’s beneath the surface.
What’s left is a Frankenstein of the anime film format, already stripped of its luster. It uniquely exposes the series’ weaknesses while failing to capitalize on its one universal claim to fame: relentless, varnished fights. An endless onslaught of battles that hurt the story, which seems to invent itself as it goes, quickly running off the rails towards any meaningful direction. Instead, it throws its hero into a blender of pain and suffering, only to rush through one chaotic yet convoluted battle after another.
By no means is this any fault solely resting on JJK‘s shoulders. Ever since GKids repopularized theatrical anime preview events, likely following in the footsteps of Demon Slayer, the refrain has been that it is actually a movie or just a compilation of episodes stitched together and carted out to theaters. All of which ended on an awkward episodic cliffhanger, leaving audiences who ponied up the cash not to be a victim of FOMO sitting on their hands for an additional week until the show proper releases and gets past the hump that the film left them hanging on.
Jujutsu Kaisen, having the added benefit of not being new to the scene with a full-arc theatrical film under its belt and having its series (and other compilation films to fall back on), had the potential to have some more meat on its bones than these other theatrical three-episode tests. Though Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and, more so, Mappa’s recently released Chainsaw Man: The Movie—Reze Arc come with the added benefit of being wholly novel as films, showcasing new developments in their story and being arranged in the typical arc of a movie (even with their endings leaving room for more to come), Execution is sadly only a half measure between these two phenomena. The median of a Venn diagram, where it attempts to do the legwork, rearranging some events to give the presence of a film, while also being diminishing returns as both a compilation of the best hits of the past and a worthwhile preview of what’s to come.
Jujutsu Kaisen’s strength has always been its fight scenes moreso than its grander narrative. Unfortunately, this compilation film reduces those battles to a supercut, stripping away context, buildup, and spatial awareness. The result feels vapid—forty minutes of condensed highlights without the narrative backbone to support them.
The first half plays like a recap, framing Itadori’s guilt and suffering, but only gestures at emotion without real weight. The second half shifts into preview mode for Season 3, emphasizing more fights and exposition. Yet after so many battles, the spectacle becomes exhausting, while the dense explanations—often delivered in exhaustive internal and external monologues that read like a list of names in a complex math problem with multi-part questions—fail to onboard viewers or clarify the convoluted power system at the heart of Jujutsu Kaisen. Instead of blending recap and preview into a coherent film, it stalls midway, leaving both halves weaker. Compared to Demon Slayer or Chainsaw Man, which provide context or complete arcs, this feels lesser: not quite a movie, not quite a recap, not quite a preview.
The second half of the film is where the actual main event unfolds—the preview of new episodes. This is the marquee attraction, the reason fans (since anyone else would have no incentive, given the format) are in theaters: the big showdown between Yuji and Jujutsu Kaisen 0’s protagonist, Yuta Okkotsu. Two heroes of their own stories are pitted against each other in a battle to the death.
The fight is typical Jujutsu Kaisen: resplendent with aura farming, hype moments, and flashy choreography. Yet, its emotional context stripped by the nature of the compilation preview that preceeded it, Yuta and Yuji’s conflict feels less like grand drama and more like watching a kid do a flip on a trampoline. The front half’s exhaustive cutting of action leaves the episodic pace of their scuffle feeling like an exhibition, rushing to ferry us into the next thing—the Culling Game arc that will follow in season 3 of the show.
That game is hilariously introduced with paragraphs of text plastered across the sky, explaining rules at a speed no human eye could read. By then, viewers’ eyes have already been exhausted from tracking the nonstop flurry of action compressed into all 90 minutes of Execution to even parse what they’re supposed to be hyped about. The result is a vapid spectacle: undeniably pretty, sure, but ultimately a mess.
Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution is a compilation-preview chimera that fails to highlight the series’ strengths and instead underscores its weaknesses. Rather than offering a cohesive story, it relies on relentless emotional torment for its protagonist, putting him through the blender for 90 minutes and mistaking that for deep, meaningful storytelling.
As a theatrical experiment, it feels like a last straw for this kind of anime release, suggesting that studios should move away from bringing stitched-together compilations with a sprinkling of new content to entice fans to theaters, and instead focus on full arcs presented as complete films. While visually impressive, Execution is narratively hollow, pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle that never quite fits, and ultimately better skipped than treated as essential viewing.
Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution is now playing in theaters and IMAX.
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