Let’s
run the numbers on this one. By his count, this is Takashi Miike’s 100th
film. Our anti-hero, Manji, is known as the “Killer of 100,” for reasons that
need no belaboring, but he has pledged to kill 1,000 bad guys to redeem
himself. It looks like he easily reaches the millennium mark judging from Miike’s
live-action adaptation of Hiroaki Samura’s popular manga series, maybe by a
factor of two or three. The body count is higher than an October’s worth of
horror films, but each hack-and-slash death is executed with Miike’s
incomparable artistry in Blade of the
Immortal (trailer
here), which
opens this Friday in New York.
Ill-fated
Manji was caught up in a Shogunate power struggle and forced to kill his own
brother-in-law. He tried to care for his younger sister Machi after grief drove
her mad, despite their fugitive status. Tragically, the smugly confident leader
of a small army of bounty-hunters kills her before his very eyes, but that
turns out extraordinarily badly for them. Of course, he kills every last one of
them, but it nearly costs him his life, which would have been fine with Manji.
Instead, the supernaturally old nun Yaobikuni slips mystically healing
bloodworms into body, rendering him immortal.
After
Rin Asano’s sensei father is killed by Kagehisa Anotsu’s Ittō-ryū martial arts cult,
Yaobikuni appears before her, recommending she seek out Manji to serve as her
bodyguard. The immortal swordsman is not inclined to be helpful, but he cannot
help feeling protective towards Asano, because she is the spitting image of Machi.
And away we go.
Frankly,
Manji is a perfect Chanbara hero for Miike’s sensibilities. Think of him as one
part Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, one part Wolverine, and a third part Larry Talbott
from the Universal Wolfman movies. The relationship that develops between him
and Asano is deeply compelling so it is easy to understand why the manga has
lasted for over a trillion volumes.
Playing
against type, Takuya Kimura (a.k.a. Kimutaku of the j-pop band SMAP) is suitably
grizzled and embittered as Manji, while Hana Sugisaki is endearingly naïve as
Asano. Arguably their relationship dynamics and characters arcs are the only
ones that mean anything in a wildly cinematic beat-down movie like this, but
Erika Toda still steals all her scenes as the lethal geisha Makie Otonotachibana,
who is a better ally than the clammy Anotsu deserves.
Character,
performance, and all the rest of that blah-blah-blah are all very nice, but the
bloody, massively over-the-top fight sequences are what this film is really all
about. It opens with some spectacular payback and ends with an epic,
large-scale, all-hands-on-deck, slice-and-dice battle. Let’s put it this way,
Miike does not surpass third act battle royale of 13 Assassins, but he comes close to equaling it, which is saying
something.
There
is no question the final battle is utterly nuts, in multiple ways, but boy, is
it ever fun to immerse yourself in. For his 100th film, Miike was
not taking any prisoners or offering any quarter. It is the kind of full-scale
chanbara blow-out that is good for what ails you, like 13 Assassins and the Rurouni Kenshin trilogy. Very highly
recommended, Blade of the Immortal opens
this Friday (11/3) in New York, at the Quad Cinema.