It is a truth universally acknowledge that any story that has made a good fortune in one medium must be in want of an adaptation. Books become movies, comic books become TV shows, animated series become live-action films … and now and then these adaptations work and now and then they do not. But in many cases, these adaptations are not as simple as they look; a huge novel often doesn’t squeeze down into the confines of the big screen, or a children's book can't expand to fill the theater. Blood: The Last Vampire is a live-action adaptation of an Japanese animated film, its animated action and stylishness now brought to live with flesh-and-blood actors and click-and-drag effects.
That original 50-minute film's spawned a comics series, a three-novel-long trilogy and a 50-episode animated spin-off, so the idea of a live-action film must have felt as potentially pleasing as it did potentially profitable. The plot follows Saya (Gianna Jun), a young woman who isn't; she's a vampire-human hybrid set loose by human masters to destroy the demons loose in 1970's Tokyo. As usually seems to happen with these things, her overlords — her grizzled, paternal mentor Michael (Liam Cunningham) excepted — are, in fact, not on the side of the angels. Saya goes on the run, along with the Alice (Allison Miller), the daughter of the American military man who was one of the first to die as part of the conspiracy's masterstroke. And this is about all the plot you get, with the revelation that the evil god who wiped out Saya's family and cursed her is, of course, behind it all.
The fact is that the sort of violence Blood: The Last Vampire dishes out is the kind of thing that works a lot better in animation than in live-action. Jean-Luc Godard once famously said of a violent sequence's crimson flood that "It's not blood, it's red." In animation, blood looks a lot more like red than it does in live action, so that a level and intensity of spurt and splatter that plays as color and light in animation just looks gushy and goofy in live action.
Jun is certainly a game enough performer — any actress who can do swordfighting and martial-arts wire-work while wearing a schoolgirl outfit is certainly fearless and enthusiastic, although you are let wondering about the exact nature of what, precisely, it is she's being fearless and enthusiastic for. There's some entertaining action sequences in Blood: The Last Vampire, and some nice martial arts action from Jun, Yasukai Kurata (as Saya's mentor) and Koyuki (as the evil demon-spirit that must be stopped). Director Chris Nahon has toiled in the fields of action filmmaking before — most notably with Jet Li's Kiss of the Dragon — and he knows exactly what to do with a script like this, which is to let it coast along on a thick greasy layer of exposition and explanation until it gets to the next fight scene.
But fight scenes aren't films, and no number of stunts can make up for a lack of story. As Blood: The Last Vampire tries to cover centuries worth of supernatural machinations in a scant 88 minutes, it feels both curiously bloated (there's a lot of dead air in the film) and mysteriously over-compressed as we have to determine who's behind what and who made who and which will die for the vengeance of the other and that kind of supernatural hoo-hah. There are a few minor DVD extras — a brief documentary on the making of the film and another on the stunts — and while the DVD looks and sounds great, the action's fury can't hide the modesty of the special effects, and the few moments of cool effects can't disguise there's not much going on aside from action. Blood: The Last Vampire's original 50-minute animated version may have inspired spin-offs and adaptations aplenty in the years since its 2000 debut, but the busy, bloody live-action version of it lacks the splash-and-slash power of the animated versions; some stories, ironically, have more to flesh them out in two dimensions.
Posted on October 22, 2009 at 4:08 pm
This one looks like a dud (unfortunately). Another disappointment from Japan? Was this a story taken from America and made here, or is it a sub/dub? I wish there were some screenshots in this article, too!
I won’t be seeing this one.