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Black Jack

Black Jack

List Price: $29.95
Your Price: $26.96
Product Info Reviews

Features:
  • Color
  • Widescreen
  • Animated
  • Dolby


Description:

This baroque melodrama is based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka that ran in various magazines from 1973 to 1983. With his facial scar, cape, and mop of black and white hair, Kuro Hazama, a.k.a. Black Jack, resembles a cross between Cruella DeVil and Captain Harlock. He's an unlicensed doctor of staggering abilities and even more staggering fees. Black Jack is called in to develop a cure for a mysterious disease that's ravaging "Super Humans"--people of no discernible ability who suddenly burst onto the scene as stars in sports or the arts. The key to the emergence of the Super Humans and the disease is pharmaceutical heiress and surgeon Jo Carol. Sometimes as allies, sometimes as enemies, Black Jack and Jo Carol uncover the nature of the disease--and the program of human experimentation that produced it. Although Tezuka's many fans will want this adventure, it doesn't represent his best work. The script is needlessly talky, and Black Jack is saved not by his abilities, but by the deus ex machina of a tribe of desert nomads. In an era of revelations about government-sanctioned medical experiments, Tezuka's story takes on a disturbing resonance, but director Osamu Dezaki squanders much of the material's potential impact. Unrated ("parental discretion advised"); suitable for ages 16 and up for violence and often grotesque medical imagery. --Charles Solomon
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