Sky High

Title: Sky High
Rating: 2/5
Genre: Action, Horror
Starring: Yumiko Shaku, Takao Osawa, Shôsuke Tanihara
Director: Ryuhei Kitamura
Language: Japanese

Helmed by the man responsible for both 'Versus' and 'Azumi,' two of my favourite Japanese action flicks, I decided to save this one, sure that once again he would deliver the goods. But actually, far from being epic it's rather disappointing, and there's nobody else that can really take the blame for this one. Let me get on with describing the plot and perhaps you'll see what I mean.

It all opens promising enough; a wedding between a young detective and his bride to be all goes tits up when she walks down the aisle with her heart removed. After much deliberating about 'how could such a thing happen' - though in the case of the doctor, literally how could she walk so far without a heart - we begin to learn of Kudo and his dark plan. Head of the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, this young billionnaire realised that all his wealth and power couldn't bring the dead back to life. So he did what any sane man with all the power available to them would do and started dabbling in the dark arts for some more. This is the real reason his wife had to die, so that Kudo could have his way in summoning the forces of darkness from the bowels of hell to do his bidding and revive his beloved wife. You still following me? Cos I ain't done yet.

You see, this dark rite requires far more than anyones heart, it requires the heart of a guardian of the gate of resentment, or at least an ex-guardian once again born into this world. These are the guardians tasked with taking care of the gate to hell, and of those who have died at anothers hand to offer them the choice: to accept their fate and go to heaven and await the rebirth, to roam the earth as a ghost, or to curse another and send you both to the fiery pits of hell. But first you get a couple of weeks to check up on the world without you. And so they watch as Kudo roams the earth, getting his secretary to do the actual killing - well he doesn't want to go to hell does he - and taking the hearts of all those he needs to in his sinister plan to bring hell on earth in the name of love, each new victim bringing him closer to his goal, and its only our young detective who can stop him.

Believe it or not, none of this ever feels too complicated. Information is unveiled in an obvious manner at a steady pace such that you never once get lost in the script for whats going on, which with a plot as detailed as this is fairly impressive. It's just that there's so much of it, they have to spend so long getting the plot details out of the way that they forget that this is intended to be an action film! For almost 90mins we are given nothing but the preparation for the finale, a couple of 10 second sequences tossed in occasionally to tease the audience and remind us that they're getting to the good bits. A cheesy joke gets tossed in occasionally to try to break things up a bit further but for a good portion of the film it feels as though you're twiddling your thumbs, waiting for something to happen.

And when things finally do kick off, it all seems over too quickly, fights ending with all talk and then a quick finish. There is some great use of lighting on the ghosts and also of sound, making use of the evidently minimal budget at his disposal, but this is no excuse for the rather lousy swordplay. It lacks the defined elegance of the classics, nor the high octane frenetic nature of his other work. It's neither realistic nor tension inducing, the participants clumsily carrying out their choregraphed moves in a slow, obvious and unconvincing manner - it's clear only one of them had ever picked up a sword before, why they didn't give the rest some training is beyond me - spending more time posing like some sort of model rather than giving us a decent fight, and this is frankly the last problem i'd have expected from him. Shrouded in this detailed excuse for an action film are some half-baked messages about the corruption of power and the limitations of our humanity, wrapped up in a plot that ties in a number of old ideas to make it seems as complex as possible; ultimately this was a pretty disappointing result.