天下制覇

  

I miss when Neil Patrick Harris was a sarcastic Dick.

That’s right, it’s that time again; to delve into the semiannual Batman thing. I make no secret about following the comic world mostly vicariously, but I’ve never been a great fan of Damian. He’s Batman’s son, but too badass and dark, and needs to be taught the true meaning of friendship justice, along the way winning the trust and adoration of those around him. It’s like they took Jason Todd and thought to themselves “We need to Mary Sue the hell out of this character.” But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so let’s see what they do with him and enough ninjas to choke an industrial sized cattle thresher.

Impressions:

 The first few thoughts that came to mind here though were “Christ, this is the worst Slade I’ve ever heard,” followed by “Whoever wrote the dialogue for this needs about a dozen knees to the groin,” and then “Oh, so all the voices are going to sound godawful.” Maybe they were all recorded in a single afternoon with an intern in charge of vocal direction, but good lord, it was all just a disaffected emotionless drawl that really only worked for Alfred and almost all of the attempted quips and taunts were bad to begin with but worse when delivered with the flair and excitement of a dead walrus. Talia and Slade in particular deserve note for both being five nines north of horrendous and Damian was… well, a standard terrible child actor.

Of course, all the silliness done without a trace of irony in the world didn’t help either. Damian was every bit the godling as I feared, even adding genius superhacker to the list of things he can do. Or effortlessly overpowering a guy four times his size. Not outfighting. Overpoweringbats. Even Slade’s master plan is just “lure him into the same room as me (and a pit of immortality), and then shoot him with a pistol.” This plan is pants-on-head moronic, which is really a running theme through the whole affair. The side-master plan was also “make lots of man-bats… world conquered!” which is thwarted by a single guy in a plane. Shooting syringes with laser-like precision. 

The ninjas/ninja man-bats are also what keeps any of the action from being particularly interesting. It’s always just beating up grunts or Damian being the greatest, most unstoppable, specialest boy wonder ever. The animation is more than sufficient, but it’s not well directed and never builds up any tension. The splashes of jam as ‘blood’ are also about as effective as Brynhildr’s attempts to throw preserves around the screen and call that gory. Even when it does things like stabbing both Damian’s arms to a wall, he just rips the knife through them and goes right back to fighting. Broken arm? Still just as strong as Slade! It’s impossible to get into it when I have to shake my head at how ridiculous it is every 30 seconds.  

It’s definitely not one of the better ones and is eminently skippable. The character arc for either Bruce or Damian is utterly nonexistent, the writing is laughably bad, the direction is poor, and the voice acting is by and large unconscionably atrocious.  If anything, Damian managed to make things even worse than I had expected. Good work, boy wonder!