Here is a film where J-rocker Hyde plays a vampire, J-rocker Gackt plays his up-from-the-gutter sidekick, lots of people shoot guns and beat each other up, and Susumu Terashima has druggy conversations with a hallucinated fish. Would that it added up to more than moping and flailing, no thanks to a story that’s so aimless and draggy it could have lost 45 minutes of its two-hour running time and not leave us feeling like anything went missing.
Moon Child kicks off in the last few hours of the 20th century (which, incredibly, the movie gets right: it’s Dec. 31, 2000, not 1999), in a vaguely pan-Asian metropolis named Maleppa. There, street urchin Sho (Gackt) runs across Kei (Hyde) in a gutter somewhere. Kei’s a vampire who’s spent a long time torn between wanting to die and not wanting to do it himself. Sho recruits him into a life of crime, since it’s handy having a friend in the underworld who’s immune to bullets, and over the next twenty-odd years they make a whole bevy of enemies, waste tons of ammo, are betrayed by close comrades, fight, split, rejoin, marry, lose loved ones, and have about two hundred pseudo-lyrical moments apiece where slow music plays and the characters look at the same thing off in the distance somewhere and mumble about life.
Gackt and Hyde: sounds like something you do in a video game, doesn't it?
A little of this goes a long way, and the movie’s draggy pacing is exacerbated all the more by its sprawling chronology. Instead of being epic, though, it just feels like the filmmakers didn’t know how to pare down their material into a more compact and effective time frame. The individual pieces are more interesting, like how at one point the story marks the passage of time by the decay of a mural drawn by one of the characters. Or the above-mentioned scenes with Terashima: he’s one of my favorite Japanese actors, and here he’s in a goofy sideline role as one of Sho’s stoner friends.
This is some odd movie. It’s too elongated and bittersweet to be a rousing guns-and-gangsters story, and I wondered why they bothered with the whole near-future setting since it isn’t really used for much of anything. It has ambition, but none of that has translated into the kind of storytelling vigor that makes it worth sticking it out for two hours. So in the end it’s just a throwaway vehicle for Gackt and Hyde, one co-written by Gackt himself, no less. They’re both decent actors — Hyde was acceptably moody in Last Quarter — but there’s not much for them to do here except fire guns, smoke cigarettes and brood like caged mice. But if that’s what you want to see, you now know where to go.
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My younger daughter is a fan of these visual kei types, and she enjoyed the movie in a self-conscious sort of yeah-I know-this-is-silly sort of way. I only saw a little bit of it, but it seemed very pretty. Very choreographed, sort of set up for emotional tableaux.
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It does look great - same with "Last Quarter" - but the script felt like they were shooting for (and missing) the kind of territory that a lot of the Hong Kong heroic-bloodshed movies hit a lot more readily. I'm still interested in seeing either of these two in a movie that makes good use of their acting chips, though.
[Reply to this comment]
My younger daughter is a fan of these visual kei types, and she enjoyed the movie in a self-conscious sort of yeah-I know-this-is-silly sort of way. I only saw a little bit of it, but it seemed very pretty. Very choreographed, sort of set up for emotional tableaux.
[Reply to this comment]
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