lackJack is a renegade surgeon, an unlicensed genius who affects a
mercenary air and a heartless demeanor. He works for the rich, commanding
multimillion-dollar fees for his unparalleled services, though he always
seems to come through for the poor, disadvantaged and innocent in the end.
But whether working for cash or veiled compassion, he rarely fails. So when
a 14-year-old patient of his dies of an apparent relapse of a heart
condition BlackJack had treated, the black-market doctor is badly shaken.
The autopsy only deepens his confusion. The teenager's internal organs
show signs of advanced decay, typical of an elderly woman's--decay that
wasn't there when BlackJack operated. As he concentrates on the case, he
ignores a series of increasingly insistent recruiting calls from an
anonymous woman with an unstated problem and a blank check. But
when the woman kidnaps his young assistant, he's forced to deal with her.
For the past two years, so-called "supermen" have been appearing all
over the globe--ordinary individuals who suddenly developed
extraordinary, world-class physical or mental talents. Now they're all
dying horribly, of the same rapid necrosis that killed BlackJack's young
patient. He finds himself working with the best reseachers and medical
minds money can buy, looking for a cure to the syndrome. But it quickly
becomes obvious that he really needs to be looking for the cause of the
superman phenomenon, while he still has a chance.
Tense, intriguing and unpredictable
The BlackJack series was created by the late, legendary Osamu
Tezuka, a.k.a. "Japan's Walt Disney," the author behind Astroboy and
Kimba the White Lion (both of which get brief visual homages in
this new addition to the continuum). The animation in this film is far more
sophisticated than Tezuka's simple, stubby drawings, much as the story is
more sophisticated than his short but satisfying morality plays. But his
protagonists are still clearly recognizable; the writers have neatly
recreated the mixture of altruism and icy apathy that made the manga
character unique.
The same writers struggle a little at the movie's length, however. Some
of the plot twists are interesting and some are downright inspired, but at
times they feel like padding. Director Osamu Dezaki seems to have similar
problems with this longer format, as he repeats the same few visual motifs
over and over until they go from dramatic to redundant to irritating. As a result,
the whole movie seems on a minor but irretrievable
downhill slide from the powerful starting point to the somewhat obvious
end.
Still, this is a generally tense and interesting science-gone-awry
story, a basically predictable plot fleshed out in fine style with
unpredictable characters and an intriguing back story. The dubbing is
competent and the deep-toned, blocky visuals are pleasant enough to watch.
And BlackJack himself is always fascinating, especially when he's
this well realized as a cataclysmically dualistic character. Tezuka's work
had a lot more heart, but looked essentially amateurish compared to this
modern continuance of his work. As a movie, BlackJack isn't perfect,
but it's not a disappointment either. Its only real flaw is its failure to
utterly shine.
