Blade of the Immortal (2017)

Blade of the Immortal arrives as Takashi Miike's hundredth feature, a milestone he reportedly greeted with the shrug of a man who had simply been too busy to count. The film adapts Hiroaki Samura's long-running manga about Manji, an immortal swordsman bound to avenge a murdered sister, and Rin, the orphan girl who recruits him. The film then devotes two hours and twenty minutes to dismemberment, double-pronged swords and chain-blades, executed with the choreographic care of a master craftsman. It is a chanbara picture, plain and simple, and it has no interest in being anything else.

The cast is entirely Japanese, playing Japanese characters in feudal Japan, so the question of representation never surfaces. The narrative concerns samurai factions and a shogunate contract, not economic classes, and the film offers no critique of capital because it has no interest in capital. Rin and Makie are capable women with swords, and Makie's wavering loyalty gives her a flicker of interiority, but the framework is the traditional revenge plot, and no thesis about patriarchy is advanced. Manji's sister Machi is mad in the way that nineteenth-century fiction uses madness, as a wound to motivate the hero. Nobody in the production appears to have consulted a discourse.

Miike stages his carnage with the enthusiasm of a man who has read his 300 and knows what sells. The film lectures no one. It has no environmental conscience, no body-image commentary, no revisionist claims about the Tokugawa era, and no LGBTQ subtext hiding in the dojo. There is blood, and there is a great deal of it. The result is a genre object from an older tradition, made for a domestic audience that wanted swordplay and received it. Judged against the cultural sensibilities of the present decade, it registers as almost perfectly inert. The sommelier may set down the glass. There is nothing in it.