bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

sponsorType

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Clarence Tsui

Starring: Gianna Jun,  Allison Miller,  Koyuki,   Liam Cunningham,  J.J. Feild  
Director: Chris Nahon  
Category: IIB (Japanese and English)
Never mind the blood or the vampires - it's the fight that drives  Blood: The Last Vampire. But it's exactly that  which undermines  Chris Nahon's film. 
This adaptation of a 2000 anime film is a collage of long, unending sequences of dazzling action choreography by Hong Kong director Cory Yuen Kwai, built upon a feeble plot with  superficial characters, the most prominent of them being Saya  (Gianna Jun Ji-hyun, right),  a 400-year-old sword-wielding vampire-hunter who  dresses like a teenage schoolgirl but is actually a blood-sucking creature.  
Flashbacks reveal her roots as Japanese, but somehow she has ended up on the payroll of a shadowy American group known as the Council, whose mission is to rid the world of vampires. 
Set in Tokyo in 1970, Saya's road to her final confrontation with the head monster, Onigen  (Koyuki),  sees her bonding with Alice  (Allison Miller, last seen in 17 Again), an American high school student who is - conveniently, for Saya and the screenwriters - the daughter of a commander of  a US military base. 
Somehow it emerges that the expatriate school Alice studies in - and where Saya is dispatched to on her quest - is filled with vampires in human form, and it's one of these creatures who tells Alice the war her father helps wage in Vietnam is irrelevant compared to the hostilities between humans and vampires. 
Rather than using the social and political context of 1970s Japan to add layers to the story - and the possibilities for metaphors abound, with a story about villains sucking their victims dry to survive - Blood  uses military uniforms and pseudo-talk about the CIA to add an English-language cachet to proceedings.
In contrast to the intense action sequences, the characters  are  wafer-thin. Saya's struggle to veer away from her vampire roots is given scant attention and the side characters seem plucked from the worst straight-to-video high school dramas or killer thrillers. 
One wonders what  Liam Cunningham (recently seen in  Steve McQueen's   Hunger) and  J.J. Feild  (the star of  Peter Greenaway's   Tulse Luper trilogy) were thinking when they deliver their hilarious B-movie lines as agents for the Council.  Or maybe they are thinking of what Saya's mentor  Kato (played by action-film veteran  Yasuaki Kurata) says to  her, that demons can appropriate human flesh, but 'they cannot conjure human souls'. 
A showpiece of computer-generated, slow-motion bloodshed and gravity-defying wirework it might be, but Blood is cartoonish to the point of being hilarious.  
Blood: The Last Vampire opens today



Blood: The Last Vampire