天下制覇

He no billy at all.

Impressions:

My primary complaint with part one was how much they half-assed Miller’s noir style. Here, they pretty much abandoned it altogether and the whole thing turned out much the better for it. The music fit better, there were a lot fewer weird presentation disconnects, and the visual style was just a lot more consistent overall. There were certainly still a lot of parts that could have… and I am well aware of the irony of me saying it… used a bit more of Batman’s inner monologue. Especially the Joker fight. That needed a bit more oomph to really sell him driving Bruce to the breaking point. Well, without Batman’s monologues in general about how badly he’s fighting and how many times he almost got himself killed, the fights are a lot less grim in general, but that’s the only place where it really got in the way. All the cop stuff with Yindel was also very much half-assed in both introduction and conclusion. …Which is was in the original too, but they certainly could’ve tied all that stuff in and/or wrapped it up a lot better. Just going with "Vigilantes bad!" and then "Actually, he’s iconic after all," and having that be about 95% of your meaningful dialogue concerning that particular plot point is a tad… yeah.

Regardless of that, the action is constant and pretty much all excellently done. Both the Bruno and Superman fights especially stood out. Great choreography, well animated, solid directed all around, none of that shakey cam nonsense or other cheapness that is so prolific elsewhere, and just the sheer amount of it. If only every one of these DC Straight-To-DVD things could look this good. Alas. It’s probably worth watching just for the fight scenes alone, even if you want to skip part one. Just don’t expect either part to match with what made the original so iconic in the first place.