Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle Delivers the Year’s Best Fight by Ditching Blades for Body Blows

Every few years, an action scene drops that makes everyone else in the genre look like they brought pool noodles to a sword fight. Demon Slayer has been that show since day one, and somehow, Infinity Castle still finds another gear.

How we got here

Ufotable staked its reputation on fight scenes from the jump: season 1 ran Tanjiro through a gauntlet of demons with wildly different gimmicks, and Mugen Train ended with a barnburner between Rengoku and Akaza that made most big-screen action look sleepy by comparison. Infinity Castle takes that legacy and pushes it harder.

The capper is the last of the movie's three Hashira-vs-Upper Rank matchups: Tanjiro and longtime ally Giyu team up to take down Akaza, the demon who murdered Fire Hashira Rengoku. It lands late in a long film, right where attention traditionally starts to sag. Not here.

The fight is a sledgehammer, not a light show

Ufotable starts the duel with Akaza on top, and then just keeps twisting the pressure. It is a blur of angles, color, and footwork, but crucially, you can feel the hits. None of that weightless, float-through-air vibe you get in lesser animation. Every strike looks like it could end someone, and that genuine sense of danger cuts straight through any comfy expectations of plot armor.

Then they pull the rug: the Akaza reveal

Right when the spectacle could have coasted to a flashy finish, the film slams the brakes. The duel gives way to a mini-story inside the story: Akaza's past. It is simple and rough in all the right ways — a cascade of losses that include the love of his life, his father, and his mentor. The guy is not a cartoonishly evil boogeyman; he is a victim of a world that kept taking until there was nothing left but rage.

And the English-language version adds an unexpected wrinkle: the sequence features Channing Tatum. He is not just there for a stunt credit; he turns in a performance that actually complicates your feelings about a dude who, again, killed a fan favorite in cold blood.

Voices that sell the swing from hatred to sympathy

Dub or sub, the cast has to thread an impossible needle — keep the intensity of a fight scene while delivering a story beat that reframes a major villain. It works. Zach Aguilar, the English voice of Tanjiro, talked about that whiplash and how he approached it.

"It's really interesting going into the movie and going into that fight, everybody has this animosity for Akaza. I feel like that shifts after you watch the film in its entirety, and you get to see it all from a different perspective."

"Emotion-wise, I just try to live in the moment, really feel the full weight of what's going on and how Tanjiro would feel after seeing a demon that killed a good friend of his."

He also teased that the next Infinity Castle films, if they track the manga, are "gonna blow some minds."

Can anything top this?

Maybe the sequels crank the scale even higher. But matching the heartbeat of this fight — the way it builds to a gut punch and then dares you to empathize with the monster — is a tall order. Plenty of 2025 set pieces were more novel or more brutal. Almost none carried this much feeling while moving this fast.

Honorable mentions

• Grenade fight, Ballerina: Ana de Armas proves she can run the Wick playbook and then scribble in the margins with an explosive flourish.
• Biplane fight, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning: Tom Cruise does death-defying slapstick at 10,000 feet, and somehow Ethan Hunt still looks like he has gas in the tank.
• Bathhouse, KPop Demon Hunters: Like vintage Asian action choreography collided with a glossy pop video — and the collision is the point. Netflix catnip.
• Invincible vs. Conquest, Invincible season 3: A city-leveling beatdown that makes a lot of superhero TV look like recess.

Bottom line: Infinity Castle does a magic trick in the middle of a brawl. It turns one of the year’s sharpest villains into someone you can actually feel for, without dulling the blade. Nobody else got that close in 2025.