Review: Lupin the IIIRD: THE MOVIE ~ The Immortal Bloodline (2025)
Natalie and Guillaume of Sideburns & Cigarettes fame were fortunate enough to attend the Paris Premiere of The Immortal Bloodline back on July 7th, 2025. Here are their impressions of Takeshi Koike’s final instalment in his Lupin the IIIRD series!
Please be aware that this review contains light spoilers for the film.
Guillaume: Our story begins with a Californian lady and a Swiss man, off to Paris for the Premiere of a Japanese movie…
Natalie: Getting there was not easy, as we barely had two weeks to plan our trip!
Guillaume: But thanks to our connections and a good amount of manic energy, we managed to reach the French capital on time for the Premiere of The Immortal Bloodline.
Natalie: How Eurozoom was able to show the movie practically a week after its Japanese release, I don’t know. It’s a good thing you were there to translate the French subtitles, by the way!
Guillaume: Pleasure’s mine! Although, you understood most of it on your own…
Natalie: Yeah, thanks to the “Universal language that melodrama gives”!
Guillaume: Speaking of melodrama, how did you feel watching the last chapter of Koike’s Lupin on the big screen?
Natalie: The film does an amazing job of recapping the previous four films, which is great for those in the audience who are first time viewers. The Lupin gang flies off to the Bermuda Triangle in the Caribbean to find out who is really pulling the strings on all these recent shenanigans.
Guillaume: And this island hides many dangers!!
Natalie: Oh yes! We got a bit of everything, from cyborg assassins, to weird festering people wearing hockey masks… and even a cackling archer lady!
Guillaume: We also get to see old foes from other Lupin the IIIRD series films, like the revenge-obsessed Yael and a disgruntled Hawk.
Natalie: Poor Hawk got yeeted out of the movie so quickly!
Guillaume: He never stood a chance against the ruler of this nightmarish island, Muom, voiced by Kataoka Ainosuke VI of recent Lupin Kabuki fame.
Natalie: Muom is a fascinating villain, but in a different way from Mamo – though his connection to our Paul Williams looking gremlin is in the bloodline.
Guillaume: I see what you did there! Just like with Mamo in the 1978 film, Lupin’s confrontation with Muom is as philosophical as it is physical. The same points from that previous film are made here too, but through slightly different means.
Natalie: And on an even bigger scale! There too, the true nature of the antagonist is a mystery that Lupin needs to solve in order to win. The final twist felt very Monkey Punch.
Guillaume: I admit, I have rarely seen our favourite thief in such a dire situation. At some point I really wondered how he, and the rest of the gang, would manage to get of the island alive!
Natalie: I remember audibly gasping at some of the action scenes. Good thing they are fictional characters because they receive some serious, albeit unrealistic injuries.
Guillaume: Speaking of the characters, we must praise the voice actors. I think Kanichi Kurita delivers his most nuanced and confident performance as Lupin III yet!!
Natalie: He really knocked it out of the park. He almost made me tear up by the end of the film…
Guillaume: Akio Otsuka delivers his most Kobayashi-esque delivery as Jigen, perfectly capturing the cheeky tones as well as the more hard-boiled moments.
Natalie: Koichi Yamadera as inspector Zenigata deserves some love too, for a performance that really left me worried for our favourite detective.
Guillaume: Also of note is the mysterious little girl, Selifa, voiced by Aoi Morikawa. She manages to be as unsettling as Muom, to the point you wonder who is leading whom. In many ways, SHE is the movie’s true antagonist.
Natalie: It is also funny to see how the characters interact with each-other, compared to what we are used to see in the rest of the franchise. Here, as this is technically a prequel still, they are not friends yet. Instead, they are forced to unite over a common foe.
Guillaume: With the exception of Fujiko, of course, who, true to herself, thinks of her own safety first.
Natalie: Hey, our girl knows her priorities!
Guillaume: Heh, she knows what’s best. But what you describe is very much Koike’s goal with this film series. He and writer Yuya Takahashi consciously stripped our characters from any sense of familiarity, keeping only the most basic premises of the franchise.
Natalie: There is no Fujicakes or Pops, little in the way of slapstick, and less reliance on single trademark outfits. Shout out to Lupin’s “dad polo shirt” by the way!!
Guillaume: These differences might seem superficial at first, but they make a powerful statement: you don’t know this Lupin. It feels like this Lupin is what would have happened had Masaaki Osumi stayed on with Part 1, to then directly go on to Mystery of Mamo. It’s an interesting exploration of the characters.
Natalie: It is true that the film can serve as a sort of prequel to Mamo, and we are happy to see more of him as he watches the action from his control room, but the movie also stands on its own.
Guillaume: I think that the most notable difference with the 1978 film, is that Lupin’s own ideological standpoint only truly forms by the end of the film, as he himself comes to understand the true value of the things he steals, and by extension the true value of human life.
Natalie: He finally finds his own belief, ending an arc where he started as rather indifferent to the state of the world, burning crucial evidence in Jigen’s Gravestone, to then undermine a political conspiracy in Zenigata and the Two Lupins, and finally deciding to go after the puppet master at the end of The Immortal Bloodline.
Guillaume: It would be dishonest to say the movie is perfect, not by a long shot. The rushed production shows its scars in places, with noticeable chara-design variations, CGI mobs, and an over-reliance on flashbacks, sometimes of things we’ve seen only moments ago.
Natalie: True, but being the concluding chapter of a series of OVAs (and one ONA), it couldn’t really have been any different. Any fan of long-running narratives knows how hard it is to properly end a story, especially when the format suddenly changes.
Guillaume: And even though he had little time to finish before the movie’s release, James Shimoji delivered yet another banger score!!
Natalie: His music really added suspense and emotional depth!
Guillaume: For those who have seen the trailers and are more easily accepting of a change in tone or scenery, The Immortal Bloodline actually feels familiar, with not only nods to Mystery of Mamo but also the 1997 TV special Island of Assassins.
Natalie: As for those surprised by the horror and sci-fi elements, remember that the Koikeverse was never realistic in the strictest sense. Our protagonists get injured, they bleed and bruise, but they ultimately recover.
Guillaume: After all Lupin, even in Koike’s world, was never about keeping it real and grounded. It was about celebrating the fact that life is but a fiction. Better have fun with it while we still can.
Natalie: All in all, The Immortal Bloodline is a great film to end the Koikeverse on. With all the same intrigue, action, and nude Fujiko moments that these films have given us these past eleven years.
I cannot wait for both the dubs of this film and Zenigata and the Two Lupins and the Blu Ray releases… if and when we get them.
Guillaume: May TMS hear you!!
Lupin the IIIRD: THE MOVIE ~ The Immortal Bloodline is officially coming out in France on November 12th, in Italy on November 15th, and later this year (2025) in Eastern Europe.
If you enjoyed this review, why not check out the Sideburns & Cigarettes podcast to hear more from both Natalie and Guillaume?
