BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE

Saya, a half-human, half-demon teenager, has the mission to kill Onigen, a demon of incredible strength responsible for the death of her father. Saya, due to her particular powers, is part of a secret agency tasked with hunting down and killing demons hidden under the appearance of humans, and for this purpose, she has been sent to a Japanese high school near a US military base, since it is in that area that intense demonic activity has been detected. With a Franco-Chinese production, Chris Nahon, director of the action film "Kiss of the Dragon" and the thriller "The Empire of the Wolves," brings to the big screen the live-action version of "Blood: The Last Vampire," the anime by Hiroyuki Kitakubo that in 2000 had a modest success. The oriental style is present, the sense of rhythm dear to the French director is also there, as is the choreography department entrusted to expert Cory Yuen, but unfortunately, it is the film itself that is missing. Let's start by saying that the title is misleading because there is no "Last Vampire," the film talks about demons, but about vampires in the mythological sense, not even a shadow, although the protagonist must feed on blood to survive. A protagonist who is the antithesis of originality, since her state reminds too closely of Blade from the eponymous series (of films and comics); but it is not only Saya — played by Gianna Jun — who turns out to be unmemorable, since the entire cast of characters is made up of fleeting figures. We start with Alice McKee, played by Allison Miller ("17 Again"), an American character completely absent in the Japanese prototype and who here has evidently been inserted to give a point of identification to the Western audience; the problem is that her character is too intrusive, visibly inserted without a real narrative purpose and the serious thing is that Alice is presented as a co-protagonist of the story. Not even the demon Onigen, who is given the features by the beautiful Koyuki ("The Last Samurai"), appears as a strong and interesting enough character, so much so that the moment of his confrontation with Saya seems almost devoid of pathos due to the little charge attributed to the character. "The Last Vampire," then, has the serious flaw of being a great narrative mess. There is the feeling that there is a lot of unexplained material, many hidden or hastily and unclear information thrown to the public. It is not even the classic film for nerds of Eastern culture nor a felt integration to the original anime, but simply a poorly developed subject, a script written with approximation that does not take into account the informative needs that a story must provide. A succession of (long) action scenes lacking a glue capable of uniting them. And if we can still spend laudable words for the action that Nahon brings to the screen, with adrenaline-filled and well-structured fights, words of outrage must instead be spent for the invasiveness of the special effects. Horrible and primitive "cosi" in computer graphics that should be the demons at Onigen's service, really unconvincing bat-like creatures due to the crude visual rendering, as well as nothing believable is the blood, always strictly in CGI, which with its droplets reminds the splatters of hemoglobin that populated the video games of the "Mortal Kombat" series. But then the thing that bothers is the hastiness of intentions of some scenes, like the one of the pursuit with the truck (very similar to the one already seen in "Underworld Evolution"), which must inevitably deal with the meager budget and the absolute lack of credibility of the staging. The overall result makes "The Last Vampire" exactly what it is: a small film with blockbuster aspirations. And when the poor guy tries to imitate the wealthy gentleman, the results are almost always on the verge of ridiculous. Nahon wasted, wrong film.