Blade Of The Immortal Review: 1000 Deaths, Each Better Than The Last

Takashi Miike is a man, one suspects, who must find little time to rest. Blade of the Immortal--an adaptation of the manga of the same name--is the director’s 100th film since his filmmaking career began in 1991; he works so fast that his 101st film, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable - Chapter 1 is already behind him, and a 102nd film is currently in post-production.

Miike’s films haven’t always come west, and the ones that make an impact internationally tend to be his most violent and provocative films (like Audition, Ichi the Killer, and the truly great 13 Assassins). Blade of the Immortal follows this grand tradition, with the film’s marketing focusing on the body count (which hovers around 1000 according to the posters and trailers) as a central gimmick. A lot of people get killed in the film’s grand and ambitious action scenes, and Miike takes every opportunity to show off the action expertise he's built up over his career. Blade of the Immortal is the kind of film you’re hoping you’ll get when you see Miike’s name on the poster--a preposterous and entertaining samurai flick with a whole lot of well-choreographed violence.

The film opens at an unspecified point in history with our hero, samurai Manji (Takuya Kimura, formerly of the boy band SMAP) slaughtering an entire gang. This would be the stand-out action set-piece of most other films, with Manji taking on what must be at least 100 men. The slaughtering is vengeance for his just-murdered sister Machi, and Manji, who has lost an arm, a hand, and a lot of blood by the end of the fight, sees no reason to keep on living. But Manji is not allowed to die yet--a mysterious old woman inserts ‘blood worms’ into him, which can repair any wounds he receives. Yes, Blade of the Immortal can be very silly, but the blood worms are a handy bit of exposition that lets the rest of the movie happen. From this point, Manji cannot die, and is doomed to live the life he has given up on.

Decades later, an unaged Manji is to hired assassinate the leader of the Ikki-ryu school of swordfighting, which has been systematically taking down every other school across the region, by Rin, the daughter of one of the master swordsman slain by the leader of the Ikki-ryu. Rin, of course, just happens to look just like his sister (Hana Sugisaka does double duty and plays both roles). Once they pair up, the film slips into a basic video game structure, with Manji essentially travelling between boss battles until he can reach the final enemy, the cold-hearted Master Anotsu (Sota Fukushi).

Blade of the Immortal wears its manga origins clearly, with its sometimes-rushed character introductions and occasional dalliances into fantasy hinting at a wider world that is being pulled from. A scene early in the film, for instance, introduces a bad guy who carries a talking decapitated head, a concept that seems to sit outside what the rest of the film is doing, and a long section where Manji confronts another immortal warrior feels like an episode from a Blade of the Immortal TV show inserted into the middle of the movie.

This is never a hindrance, though, with screenwriter Tetsuya Oishi (who also handled the superior Japanese live action adaptations of Death Note) ensuring that there’s no assumed knowledge, and that the film's concepts are kept relatively simple. A lot is communicated through character design and performance, with even minor, quickly dispatched enemies often having distinctive hair styles, laughs, movement tics, or other characteristics that distinguish them. If you can buy into blood worms causing immortality you’ll be fine, although you still might come away a bit perplexed by the film’s sense of morality. There’s a philosophical through-line here about what separates good from evil that never adds up to much, and scenes where characters don’t have their swords drawn can sometimes drag.

This is a minor issue though--the film is two and a half hours long, but does not feel stretched out, and there’s always something in the frame that feels worthy of your attention. Manji himself is a great piece of design, with his thick scars and wild samurai hairstyle. Kimura fits the stoic, haunted archetype he’s playing well, and acquits himself during the film’s numerous wild action set-pieces. He performed the role with a severe ligament injury to his right knee, but you’d never know from watching him.

Miike is an old pro at framing action by now, and the film takes time to impress upon the viewer the beauty of old Japan amongst all the bloodshed. There are plenty of slow pans and artful wide shots, assuring that the movie--which is, again, about an immortal samurai on a killing spree--feels like a project that the production staff took very seriously, despite its obvious silliness. Surprisingly, Manji’s immortality doesn’t really detract from the tension of the fight scenes either. The basic rule of storytelling is that you can’t kill the protagonist before the final battle, but with Manji, anything short of death could happen--he could get stabbed, chopped up, beaten, broken down, or worse.

Speaking of the final battle, good heavens. Miike is an audacious director when it comes to big action--the phenomenal battle that anchors 13 Assassins being the standout example--but Blade of the Immortal’s follow-through on its final set piece battle is phenomenal. Usually, if a movie sets up a fight as ridiculous as the one Blade of the Immortal does, it will find some way out of actually showing it--a character will run at their enemies, the screen will fade to white, and the next scene will show the battle’s aftermath (in fact, Miike actually does something similar with an earlier scene). Not so here--instead we get a lengthy, truly marvelous action sequence. This absurd scene of wonderfully choreographed extreme violence, which manages to tie together most of the film’s narrative threads while spilling an incredible amount of blood, is really what you came to see.

Blade of the Immortal is being compared to Logan, and on a conceptual level this is fair--it’s about an older, cynical, invincible man protecting a young protege that he feels a deep connection to, by going on a killing spree. But Miike’s film is far goofier, and while it doesn’t carry any real emotional weight it’s more ambitious as an action film. Across 100 films, the quality of Miike’s work has been understandably inconsistent; hopefully, Blade of the Immortal is indicative of how good the next 100 will be.