Miike’s manga madness
Blade of the Immortal. (R16, 141 mins) Directed by Takashi Miike ★★★★
If we’re speaking of all things immortal, Blade of the Immortal is legendary Japanese director Takashi Miike’s 100th film.
A quick rummage on Google tells me that maybe only John Ford has ever boasted a longer inventory. It’s an astonishing number. Made all the more incredible – in my experience at least – because Miike’s films are mostly terrific. Or at least problematic enough to be fascinating.
Then again, film is a notoriously unsentimental business. No matter what your history or reputation, once you lose your touch at the box office, the funding tap gets turned off pretty fast. Judging by Blade of the Immortal, there’s not much danger of Miike not getting the green light for whatever his next project is. This film is a rollicking, hilarious, blood-drenched relentless crowdpleaser for pretty much every one of its 141 minutes.
Based on a manga series, Blade follows a near-immortal swordsman around feudal Japan as he fights hordes and henchmen while seeking revenge for the family of a young woman – a dead ringer for his murdered sister, naturally – whose only family have been sliced and diced by the requisite pony-tailed villain.
The swordsman’s immortality comes courtesy of an infestation of bloodworms that stitch his wounds back together as fast as his opponents can inflict them.
My own – admittedly culturally tone-deaf – take on Blade of the Immortal is that it could easily have been 30 minutes shorter, but that I still enjoyed every moment of it. Especially when a couple of the more lurid swordfights couldn’t help but remind me of Monty Python’s ‘‘indestructible’’ Black Knight.
If you like your violence cartoonish, your action expertly choreographed, your fight scenes to be old-fashioned limb-chopping orgies of blood and gore and your moral quandaries resolved without too much dialogue then I reckon you’ll come out of Blade of the Immortal more than happy. I did. – Graeme Tuckett