Movie Review: Batman Ninja

Batman: Ninja [2018]

Well, this is a pretty weird review that I'm going to have to write. It's created almost entirely by big-name anime makers, and rolls on with pretty smooth CGI models and some really fun reinventions, and tries to work in as many anime tropes as it possibly can into its 85-minute runtime. 

The concept is a pretty fun one for an 'Elseworlds' style story -- during a battle against the villainous Gorilla Grodd (unexpectedly borrowed from Flash's rogues gallery), Batman and all of his supporting cast gets sent back to Edo-era Japan, during the time of the Warring States, except the Arkham villains have somehow taken over the different states and is using Japan as their own personal playground. It's a fun excuse plot just to have Batman fight against samurais and ninjas and giant mecha-robots (this is anime, after all) in feudal Japan, and while it might be ridiculous to some, a crossover between Batman and all sorts of anime tropes marries two things I really like...

And the movie's pretty great. For the first half, anyway. The visual treat of having the smooth CGI models is pretty great, and the voice acting in both English and Japanese (yeah, I watched this movie twice -- the scripts are entirely different, but the gist of the story is the same) are well-delivered. The highlight of the movie, for me, has to be Batman's initial assault on Joker's Arkham Castle, where the castle transforms into some crazy clockwork contraption with robotic arms, while all Batman has to his name is his batmobile (which in turn transforms into the Batwing, then the Batcycle, and then into a robotic suit of armour because of anime). Oh, and Bane is there as a sumo wrestler for some reason! That's fun. 

And the quality of the animation, at least the CGI parts, are just pretty great. The final battle, in particular, with Batman and Joker sword-fighting on top of a giant castle robot (more on that later) and later Batman pulling an Uchiha Itachi and exploding into bat-swarm illusions, is insanely well-animated, as much as that part of the movie drags on and on. Plus, y'know, Batman-samurai's pretty cool. There are a bunch of really good action bits elsewhere as well, like the scene where Grodd and Batman confront Joker's ship in the ocean, or basically any fight that involves Batman going toe-to-toe against generic footsoldiers. Also impressive is the original explanation of which villain has taken which parts of Japan, with stylized Japanese-style drawings of their visages leading up to a JoJo-style dramatic mugshot being pretty awesome. 

And every fifteen minutes, the stakes are raised. From "Batman in feudal Japan where Joker has taken over", we then jump into giant robot castles and transforming batmobiles, and then we get even more ridiculous as we get the huge revelation that each of the villains have a castle, and they're all manipulated by Grodd into making parts of a Voltron/Devastator-style combining mecha*... and then Batman and the Robin squad make their own giant mecha by... using a flute to control monkeys, and then combining those with a swarm of bats? Um.

*There are some really fun and ridiculous designs among the bad guys' mecha-castles, I must say. My favourite has to be the unexpected multiple-armed golden Buddha that Two-Face of all people drives. 

Yeah, the climax of the movie went way off the rails, and it ends up going from "ridiculously crazy-awesome" to just ridiculous. The giant combining robot mecha was already iffy, but still fun. But having a gajillion monkeys combine into a weird legion-being, which then combine with a bat swarm? It all comes out of nowhere, and neither Grodd's flute being able to control monkeys or the fact that the ninja clan uses Naruto-level ninjutsu was ever brought up, and that felt a wee bit too hard to swallow as a narrative point. 

There are a fair amount of parts of the movie that really didn't work for me. There's the aforementioned off-the-rails nonsense of animals forming a giant figure to fight Joker's giant robot, of course. The sub-plot of the Joker and Harley having a weird Death-Note-esque gambit hypnotizing themselves into being 'sane' to fool Batman is just pretty clunky as a plot point and doesn't really make sense, and the stretch of the movie that involves Red Hood and Batman confronting Farmer!Joker and Farmer!Harley, while done in a traditional hand-drawn style, feels pretty out of place and seems to just use a different art style just for the hell of it without any real point other than being self-indulgent. There's also the inclusion of Monkichi, the generic anime-animal-sidekick that gets worked into the finale in a half-assed way.

The Clan of the Bat ninjas are also a bit weird -- there's no real explanation to their prophecy and why they revere Batman so much (their goddamn village is done in the style of the Batman symbol). Their main leader, Aeon, is less memorable than Monkichi, and despite them being a perfectly reasonable outlet to make the final plot twist feel like something that's not an asspull, they overall feel underused. Likewise, most of the supporting characters not named Batman, Joker, Grodd or Catwoman also feel really bland and under-utilized. Poison Ivy, Deathstroke, Penguin, Bane, Red Robin and Nightwing are glorified cameos. Alfred, Harley Quinn, Two-Face and Red Hood do a bit of things you'd associate them with (Alfred being a butler, Harley being a sidekick to Joker, Two-Face betraying Grodd at the flip of a coin, Red Hood being more violent than the other Robins), while Damian Wayne's Robin gets straight-up butchered from the most psychotic of the Robins to a generic happy-go-lucky young anime boy. 

Out of the big players, Batman ends up working his way into adapting to unlikely circumstances and 'becoming the symbol' that feudal Japan (or the Bat-ninja-clan, anyway) needs him to be. Not particularly deep, but eh. Joker's script is pretty interesting, and while "you can't kill me, can you, hero?" isn't particularly new for the character, it's still fun enough to listen to both Tony Hale and Wataru Takagi go wild as the character. Grodd and Catwoman essentially play as the unpredictable villains that ally themselves with whoever's convenient, with Grodd being the more evil one and Catwoman being a more heroic anti-hero. It's not a particularly solid story for anyone that's not these main four characters, but eh. 

Overall, the big selling point of Batman Ninja for me is really its art style and the sheer insanity involved in everything that's going on here. It's not a particularly deep or compelling storyline, and it does go really off the rails at the end, and the story stops really making sense around the halfway point, which is a shame... but it's still a hilarious movie to watch just because of how pretty and how insane it ends up being. It's not a particularly good movie, but it's glorious to watch with so many visual delights, and I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy myself watching this madcap iteration of familiar characters. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The combined monkey-bat giant Batman figure is an almost-identical adaptation of how Batman's original costume back in the early pages of Detective Comics looked. 
• When his face gets bloodied in the final battle, Joker's blood-smeared face makes him look pretty similar to Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight. The way that the two of them end up finishing their fight is also similar to TDK (y'know, sans samurai swords and genjutsu), with Batman letting Joker fall from a building before saving him with his grapple line. 
• This is Red Robin's first appearance in anything outside of the comics. Tim Drake, the third Robin, has appeared in many adaptations as Robin, but never as his post-Robin persona, Red Robin, which he assumed after passing on the Robin mantle to Damian Wayne.