A dynamic and charismatic action heroine gets lost in “Revolver Lily,” a ponderous and repetitive period piece about a lady assassin indirectly trying to head off WWII by protecting a kid who has documents incriminating the Japanese Army in an illegal fund-raising-for-war scheme.

It’s something of an action fantasy, with a ghostly shaman/healer woman and a villain (Hiroya Shimizu) who seems unkillable. There’s a little rewriting history, and more myth-building about naval genius Admiral Yamamoto (Sadao Abe), who is a mere high-ranking captain in the film’s between-the-world-wars setting.

And our bloodied heroine (Haruka Ayase) has more lives than a Looney Tunes animated cat.

But as the plot is basically this kid (Jinsei Hamura) gets caught by army goons time and again, only to have veteran assasin Yuri Ozone (Ayase) rescue him, time and again, “repetitive” speaks for itself. And with the action consisting of Ozone slicing, stabbing and shooting a few companies of 1920s Japanese infantry, director and co-writer Isao Yukisada’s picture struggles to escape that repetition.

Even strikingly-staged shootouts — Oh look, they’re blindly blazing away at each other in dense Tokyo fog! — play as static set-pieces that make us question how many times our 111 pound heroine can be shot and stabbed before she bleeds out.

Goons bust in on a “connected” Chichibu family and when they don’t find the patriarch there, they massacre the women and children.

Young teen Shinta (Jinsei Hamura) survives, holding his tongue as blood drips through the floorboards onto him in his hiding place. His instructions from dad were to find this lady detective and accomplished killer, Yuri Ozone.

She’s been laying low. “I’ve stopped killing people,” she insists, when asked. But when straw-boater-hatted dandies swoop down on the kid on a train, she finds him. She can’t help but note that — matching Gatsby shirt, trousers, vests and hats aside — their weapons are army issued.

Those “documents” the kid has detail money-raising through stock fraud, and the army is hellbent on keeping them from the public and maybe from the navy, as well.

Yuri has a life partner geisha (Kavka Shishido) and a younger sex-worker-district ally (Kotone Furukawa). And where would any of them be without the crusading lawyer Iwami (Hiroki Hasegawa) on their side? He’s pretty handy to have around in a fight, too.

There are lots of those, seeing as how the boy Shinta keeps getting grabbed — on the train, on the street, in the hills and by the lakes.

The fight choreography has its moments, and others where we see the easily-dodged stage-punches.

The shootouts sound like the effects team settled on nail-gun noises to use instead of anything resembling a pistol shot.

But the period detail is OK, with the occasional anachronism (two-way military radios showing up a decade early) to keep us on our toes.

The entire affair has too many characters three or four top villains — to track and too many longueurs between the action beats to sustain interest.

Still, as lady assassin stories are all the rage, especially in Asian cinema, we trust that all those Yuri Ozone action figures Ayase supposedly posed for will get better use in other films.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Haruka Ayase, Hiroki Hasegawa, Jesse, Hiroya Shimizu,
Jinsei Hamura, Itsushi Toyokawa,
Kavka Shishido and Sadao Abe.

Credits: Directed by Isao Yukisada, scripted by Tatsuo Kobayashi, Kyô Nagaura and Isai Yukisada. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:19