Review of Batman Ninja (2018) by Michael M — 19 Jun 2018

I debated giving this movie as high a rating as I did...but god damn it, this movie just entertained the hell out of me. Is it a masterpiece? No, probably not, but it is one of the most outrageously satisfying pieces of animation I've seen in a long time.

I guess the biggest flaw you could give this movie is at times not giving a s***. It jumps straight into the action with no introduction and within minutes Batman is in feudal Japan and things are going nuts.

From there a lot of crazy things will happen in the plot without much logic or explanation. For example, Joker's castle can transform into a mech. When did he set this up? How did he set this up? Where did he get the technology to do this in ancient Japan? Never explained, now shut up and look at how f***ing cool it is.

That's really a small taste of the attitude of this whole movie, and goddamn if it didn't totally work for me, sometimes against my better judgement. The movie is just a relentless string of awesome.

It's like a tribute to the awesome things of old school anime combined with the awesome things in Batman mythos, and it's just cool. I even remember one point I won't spoil where I made a joke to my friend watching it where something was happening and I made a joke about an absurd direction it could go with the scene, but then seconds later the movie did the thing I had said as a ridiculous joke.

The film is relentlessly entertaining. There was one moment where for a matter of seconds I thought "maybe this movie is longer than it really needs to be" but before I could even finish the thought something awesome started happening again.

It's fanservice through and through, but godamn if it isn't enjoyable fanservice. I loved this movie.