Based on a popular manga that this writer has no familiarity with whatsoever, Takashi Miike‘s “Blade of the Immortal” begins aggressively in medias res, with Manji (Takuya Kimura) engaging in some badass black-and-white samurai-swording in the service of protecting his little sister, Machi, from some seriously bad dudes who wish her harm. The film’s cold open goes to some places, let me tell you. Shit — none of which will I spoil here — goes down. Suffice it to say: when it’s all over, Manji has lost an eye, but gained the supernatural gift of immortality.
Fifty-odd years later, a hilariously grizzled Manji is living in an abandoned cabin, wishing he could just friggin’ die already, when he is approached by a young girl by the name of Rin. Rin, played by a determined Hana Sugisaki, is out to avenge the death of her father at the hands of Kagehisa Anotsu, the leader of a villainous group of rebels known as the Itto-Ryu. She had heard tell of Manji, immortal swordsman/hermit, and would like to enlist his help in her quest to kill Anotsu and the other members of Itto-Ryu. Manji is at first dismissive of Rin, even antagonistic towards her, but as you might guess, he is soon persuaded to join her crusade for revenge. Over the course of the film, the two of them learn to love and respect one another.
The film becomes what is essentially an endless series of swordfights, some more complex than others: one member of the Itto-Ryu has a poison that can kill even Manji; an unrelated mercenary, earlier having had his hand chopped off by Manji, now uses the sharpened, exposed bones in his arm as his weapon. And as even I know is obligatory convention in samurai film, the superhero-esque Manji faces off against hordes of nameless men at multiple points throughout the film, one dude vs. dozens and dozens of extras, with Manji coming out victorious on virtually every occasion.
The fights do get to be a bit monotonous (the film runs a healthy two hours and twenty minutes), but each and every one of them is bolstered by expert cinematography from returning Miike collaborator Nobuyasu Kita (among their previous collaborations is the delightfully titled “Ninja Kids!!!,” which I swear to God is now at the top of my watchlist). The sets in “Blade Of The Immortal” tend to look fairly similar, with decrepit wooden structures serving as the backdrop to most of the extended fight sequences, but Mikke, Kita, and co. more than make up for that with their across-the-board wonderful wardrobe choices: characters are made distinct by their dark purple coats, their nonsensically bleached-blonde hair, their airy, light-blue fighting attire. Watching the color-coded characters whiz around on-screen as swords and axes clash and clang around them is a joy.
Miike establishes some very strange editing patterns in this film: you’ll be outside a hut one moment and inside the next, with the action seemingly flowing as if the location was the same. He rarely uses establishing shots, letting the scenery play itself out as each new sequence unfolds; in general, the film’s sense of time and spacial relations is strange and disorienting. While I know for a fact that this has caused annoyance for some viewers, I quite liked the jarring, unconventional editing patter Miike originates here. It makes sense, in a strange way, for a movie that is much more interested in the visceral than the logical.
Another convention that Miike dispenses with regards the character of Rin. You’d think, with a film like this, where a young girl trains under a master swordsman to avenge the brutal murder of her father (and rape of her mother), that the young girl would at some point turn into a little badass, like Hit Girl or X-23, becoming a murder machine and subverting our expectations of little girls’ behavior. But no — excluding one moment toward the very end of the film, Rin takes part not-at-all in the film’s capital-A Action. It’s weird: you keep expecting her to jump out from whatever she happens to be crouching behind at the moment and whop someone’s head off, but it never happens. So if you’re coming into this movie expecting little-girl-beheading-grown-men type stuff, you’re gonna end up disappointed.
Instead, Rin simply watches Manji fight, their growing connection motivating him to push forward in their mission to kill Anotsu. Rin and Manji’s relationship is the presumed emotional center of this movie, by the way, but I promise you this: when the credits roll, it will not be the sentimental student-teacher/brother-sister dymanic that you are playing over in your head so much as this one time that Manji detaches the blade of one sword, connects it to the bottom of another, creating an intense fucking double-bladed weapon, and uses it to vigorously dismember some number of bad guys. Miike is not particularly successful in developing the bond between Manji and Rin, bringing us to the real question: does he even give a shit, or is the Manji-Rin relationship primarily an excuse to bring us two-plus hours of gory fencing nonsense? Somehow I think the latter is closer to the truth.
Anotsu, by the way, is played mysteriously by Sōta Fukushi, leaning into his character’s androgynous nature to such an extent that he comes out the other end as just plain creepy-as-shit. Anotsu makes for a fairly excellent villain, in that his philosophy — if not all his actions — is almost coherent, as regards his criticism of the structuring and rigidity of Japan’s samurai schools. The film’s secondary villains are fantastic as well, with the arm-bone mercenary being the most memorable due to the visceral nature of his weaponry.
“Blade of the Immortal” is far from profound, and likely isn’t representative of the best that contemporary Japanese samurai cinema has to offer. It’s also not for the faint of heart — Miike likes his dismemberment. There’s also a lot of rape, which Miike uses here as a plot device on more than one occasion. Still and all, if you’re in the mood for a couple hours’ worth of absolutely off-the-wall immortal samurai action, you could do far worse than this. [B]