I've actually heard about Black Lagoon a long time ago when it was mentioned to me as a good show to watch coming out of Cowboy Bebop, but I never got around to actually watching it at all and kinda forgot about it after that. Then I saw it again in a Recommended Anime list and, since I got absolutely nothing better to do right now, and since I like realistic (or at least semi-realistic) animes, I gave it a shot and I binge watched all 29 episodes of the english dub of it. So hold on to your ass, my bitches, because we're gonna review this damn fucker.
Black Lagoon opens with a Japanese businessman named Rokuro (abbreviated to Rock from here on out) getting constantly kicked around by his higher-ups. But this very quickly ends as, on a business trip to the south pacific, he gets captured and held for ransom by a group of pirates labelled simply as the "Lagoon Company" composed of a black Vietnam vet, Bob Hackerman, and an edgy teenager's wet dream of a girl called Revy, who is responsible for the decision to hold Rock for ransom to get some extra cash.
Unfortunately for the Company, this doesn't work out so well as the business that Rock worked for decides instead that the disk the pirates first stole from the ship Rock was on is much more valuable than he is, sending out a merc team to "deal" with them all and get the disk back. At the end of this short beginning arc, Rock realizes the thrill of being a part of the Company and decides to abandon his former life completely in favor of joining the Lagoon Company for good.
During the length of the show, we see Rock slowly acclimatizing to his new environment and the character development of his new teammates. What follows is a strange up and down path through frivolity and incredibly dark themes. At first I thought this was going to be something like Far Cry 3, where Rock becomes some warrior figure, but interestingly, that is actually not what happens at all. In fact, throughout the entire 29 episodes of the series, he never fires a gun even once. Instead, we see Rock keeping a grip on his values while still questioning them as he sees all these terrible shades of moral blackness and the justification of them, or the lack of it, by the people who commit them.
At times, we'll see some very serious moments such as Rock and Revy inside an old WWII sub discussing what matters and what doesn't. And then after that, we're back to shooting Neo-Nazis point blank in the face as Revy cackles madly and somehow manages to not take even a single bullet as she simply walks from room to room. I'm not kidding.
Which brings me to my first and one of the biggest complaints I have about BL. It's not that it has action sequences. Far from it. They're even animated pretty well. And it's not even the fact that Revy and the vet are badasses. It's how these action sequences are executed. I swear, I don't think I've ever seen anyone wear as thick a suit of plot armor as Revy does. I think the biggest atrocities she commits in this entire show are against the rules of combat. She'll jump around with insane strength while dual-wielding her Berettas in completely ridiculous fashion while every damn mook catches a terminal case of Stormtrooper Marksmanship. And she's not the only one. A handful of key characters are also like this, only getting hit when it's convenient to the story even though they violate key combat tactics in such terrible terrible ways.
This is something that Cowboy Bebop really excelled in by contrast. Sure, Spike was a badass mob enforcer. Sure, Jet was an elite cop and investigator. Sure, Faye is a gun-savvy thief. But they were all still vulnerable, they still kept to basic tactics, and they have still been one-upped a fair few times in combat. Even by other background mooks. Just as it would be in real life. This is not so in Black Lagoon. But I don't wanna harp on this too long and we still got a long way to go yet, so let's move on.
The other, and thankfully last big problem with this show is that some of the dialogue can get cheesy. This happily goes away mostly after the 5th episode or so, but even after that, it still comes out every once in a while. For these cringey parts, it really feels like there was a writing tug-of-war between some actually professional writer and an honest-to-goodness teenager. "OK we're gonna have a show featuring the duality of crime. It's attraction and it's awful consequences. ALRIGHT BUT WE GONNA HAVE WICKED SICK KUNG-FU GUNFIGHTS AND STUFF YO."
Besides that though, there is another much smaller but still apparent problem where every single character seems to be smoking every damn chance they get. It gets to be a fun little game of sorts of betting whether there will be a main character appearing in this series that doesn't smoke. My guess is, during the talking scenes, the animators needed something to do so they just had every character smoke. Oh, and there's nudity in this show, but a little more on that later. Again, we gotta move along here.
Now, despite all these problems... I still cannot help but really like this show. Maybe not as much as Cowboy Bebop, but there's definitely enough stand-out moments in here to salvage it a ton, if not completely. And Revy I also cannot help but like as well. In many ways, she's the heart of the show and epitomizes it pretty well, showing the shows strengths and it's flaws in one character, so she definitely needs to be discussed.
I said in the beginning that she's pretty much an edgy teenager's wet dream and I very much meant that. But in a way, maybe that's kind of the point. Maybe she represents the sort of elemental primal attraction lawless living holds for us. As we watch her dealings with others and her teammates, we see her short temper and her quick trigger finger along with her devil-may-care attitude about morality and common ideological beliefs, and all while being dressed in super low-cut jeans and a low-cut shirt as well, showing off her blatant sexiness, as if to make her, or should I say, the concept of doing what you want when you want even more desirable. But she is kept from going off the deep end entirely by Rock and her other teammates. So while she is very much a loose cannon in a lot of ways, she is at least a little bit grounded and is also constantly loyal to her team.
This is where the character interactions get really interesting here between Rock and Revy, with Rock acting as a foil to Revy, making for some pretty entertaining back and forths. Although Rock constantly shows signs of the entire criminal world getting to him and wanting to join Revy in her blatant disregard for morals or even simple justice, he, in the end, stays constant in his beliefs, always trying to help others and to call people out even if they sometimes turn around and straight up *****-slap him for acting this way in this kind of extreme environment. Interestingly enough as well, Revy quickly grows to feel protective of him, going out of her way constantly to get him out of danger although she would never in a million years admit it to Rock or even herself. After a rescue, it's cute in a Stockholmy kind of way to see her hit, manhandle, and scream at him for his actions, inadvertently showing even more how much she actually cares about him.
And these environments are extreme. Make no mistake. Black Lagoon spares no time in both telling and showing us what a wretched hive of scum and villainy Roanapur, the fictional city in the south pacific most of the show takes place at, is. The star in this place is definitely Balalaika, a woman who used to be a Russian special forces officer, although there are other entertaining key figures as well, such as a CIA-affiliated "nun", and Chang, a Triad head.
If it wasn't already obvious, this series can get pretty damn dark. Mostly in the second and third season. Notably, we see a flashback sequence of Revy getting graphically abused and raped when she was young, which led to her killing her father. While it doesn't actually show any nudity, it's still shocking that they would actually go there. Then we have nasty war crimes, dismembering bodies for easy storage, and although it's not shown, we're told of two kids who got sold to an absolute shit person and were abused and forced to kill other children. Even typing that sentence out kinda makes me cringe with disgust, but there you go.
The ending to the series could have been a bit better though. The plot kind of meanders off with a bunch of politically-motivated crap and it's kind of hard to care about it, and I think it focuses too much on one of the side characters instead of the main crew of the Lagoon Company. Which brings me to my strong desire of me wanting to rewrite this show. It's got so much potential and a lot of parts are already pretty well-written and animated and staged. If only they could have taken one month or so to do a quick clean-up of the script, I'm pretty sure it would have been counted as a gritty classic of Anime.
At times, we'll see some very serious moments such as Rock and Revy inside an old WWII sub discussing what matters and what doesn't. And then after that, we're back to shooting Neo-Nazis point blank in the face as Revy cackles madly and somehow manages to not take even a single bullet as she simply walks from room to room. I'm not kidding.
Which brings me to my first and one of the biggest complaints I have about BL. It's not that it has action sequences. Far from it. They're even animated pretty well. And it's not even the fact that Revy and the vet are badasses. It's how these action sequences are executed. I swear, I don't think I've ever seen anyone wear as thick a suit of plot armor as Revy does. I think the biggest atrocities she commits in this entire show are against the rules of combat. She'll jump around with insane strength while dual-wielding her Berettas in completely ridiculous fashion while every damn mook catches a terminal case of Stormtrooper Marksmanship. And she's not the only one. A handful of key characters are also like this, only getting hit when it's convenient to the story even though they violate key combat tactics in such terrible terrible ways.
This is something that Cowboy Bebop really excelled in by contrast. Sure, Spike was a badass mob enforcer. Sure, Jet was an elite cop and investigator. Sure, Faye is a gun-savvy thief. But they were all still vulnerable, they still kept to basic tactics, and they have still been one-upped a fair few times in combat. Even by other background mooks. Just as it would be in real life. This is not so in Black Lagoon. But I don't wanna harp on this too long and we still got a long way to go yet, so let's move on.
The other, and thankfully last big problem with this show is that some of the dialogue can get cheesy. This happily goes away mostly after the 5th episode or so, but even after that, it still comes out every once in a while. For these cringey parts, it really feels like there was a writing tug-of-war between some actually professional writer and an honest-to-goodness teenager. "OK we're gonna have a show featuring the duality of crime. It's attraction and it's awful consequences. ALRIGHT BUT WE GONNA HAVE WICKED SICK KUNG-FU GUNFIGHTS AND STUFF YO."
Besides that though, there is another much smaller but still apparent problem where every single character seems to be smoking every damn chance they get. It gets to be a fun little game of sorts of betting whether there will be a main character appearing in this series that doesn't smoke. My guess is, during the talking scenes, the animators needed something to do so they just had every character smoke. Oh, and there's nudity in this show, but a little more on that later. Again, we gotta move along here.
Now, despite all these problems... I still cannot help but really like this show. Maybe not as much as Cowboy Bebop, but there's definitely enough stand-out moments in here to salvage it a ton, if not completely. And Revy I also cannot help but like as well. In many ways, she's the heart of the show and epitomizes it pretty well, showing the shows strengths and it's flaws in one character, so she definitely needs to be discussed.
I said in the beginning that she's pretty much an edgy teenager's wet dream and I very much meant that. But in a way, maybe that's kind of the point. Maybe she represents the sort of elemental primal attraction lawless living holds for us. As we watch her dealings with others and her teammates, we see her short temper and her quick trigger finger along with her devil-may-care attitude about morality and common ideological beliefs, and all while being dressed in super low-cut jeans and a low-cut shirt as well, showing off her blatant sexiness, as if to make her, or should I say, the concept of doing what you want when you want even more desirable. But she is kept from going off the deep end entirely by Rock and her other teammates. So while she is very much a loose cannon in a lot of ways, she is at least a little bit grounded and is also constantly loyal to her team.
This is where the character interactions get really interesting here between Rock and Revy, with Rock acting as a foil to Revy, making for some pretty entertaining back and forths. Although Rock constantly shows signs of the entire criminal world getting to him and wanting to join Revy in her blatant disregard for morals or even simple justice, he, in the end, stays constant in his beliefs, always trying to help others and to call people out even if they sometimes turn around and straight up *****-slap him for acting this way in this kind of extreme environment. Interestingly enough as well, Revy quickly grows to feel protective of him, going out of her way constantly to get him out of danger although she would never in a million years admit it to Rock or even herself. After a rescue, it's cute in a Stockholmy kind of way to see her hit, manhandle, and scream at him for his actions, inadvertently showing even more how much she actually cares about him.
And these environments are extreme. Make no mistake. Black Lagoon spares no time in both telling and showing us what a wretched hive of scum and villainy Roanapur, the fictional city in the south pacific most of the show takes place at, is. The star in this place is definitely Balalaika, a woman who used to be a Russian special forces officer, although there are other entertaining key figures as well, such as a CIA-affiliated "nun", and Chang, a Triad head.
If it wasn't already obvious, this series can get pretty damn dark. Mostly in the second and third season. Notably, we see a flashback sequence of Revy getting graphically abused and raped when she was young, which led to her killing her father. While it doesn't actually show any nudity, it's still shocking that they would actually go there. Then we have nasty war crimes, dismembering bodies for easy storage, and although it's not shown, we're told of two kids who got sold to an absolute shit person and were abused and forced to kill other children. Even typing that sentence out kinda makes me cringe with disgust, but there you go.
The ending to the series could have been a bit better though. The plot kind of meanders off with a bunch of politically-motivated crap and it's kind of hard to care about it, and I think it focuses too much on one of the side characters instead of the main crew of the Lagoon Company. Which brings me to my strong desire of me wanting to rewrite this show. It's got so much potential and a lot of parts are already pretty well-written and animated and staged. If only they could have taken one month or so to do a quick clean-up of the script, I'm pretty sure it would have been counted as a gritty classic of Anime.
Now, at the end of the day, would I recommend this show? I mean... I actually don't know. It crosses a lot of moral boundaries (depends on whether you consider that a good or bad thing) and even putting that aside, it commits some dialogue and combat sins, but I still liked it in a pretty dark visceral kind of way and it's good moments really do stand out. I guess I would, as long as you know what you're getting into. Cowboy Bebop, this is not. Although at first glance, they seem similar, they tackle very different themes and do things in very different ways. If that's alright with you and you can accept it's problems, then absolutely. Watch it, and don't forget your Hawaiian shirt. But if not, you probably should look somewhere else.
Final Score: 7.8/10
