Batman, along with many of his allies and adversaries, finds himself transported to feudal Japan by Gorilla Grodd's time displacement machine.
"East meets west."
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Gimly
10/4/2018
2 / 10
Okay, so I'm about to totally rail on _Batman Ninja_, but before I do that, I wanted to open it up with the following disclaimer: I thought multiple times throughout watching this "I wonder if this could be the sort of thing that's fun if you watched it in a group setting?". Personally, I watched it by myself, on a bad day, bedridden, feeling very, very unwell. And that's the experience I'm reviewing.
Movies don't have to be grounded to be good. They don't have to be be standardised to be good. They don't even have to make sense to be good. Sometimes a movie is just silly fun and everything else is moot. But most of the time, the better a movie is (ie. The more you as the individual viewer are appreciating your experience) the more nonsense you are willing to forgive. It's easier to suspend disbelief, even a great big fat disbelief, if everything else in the movie is working. If not everything is working, but you're only called upon to accept a small amount of ridiculousness, then that will generally fly. But in some movies... In some movies, there is absolutely nothing that is working, and yet those same movies will ask you for the biggest, fattest suspension of disbelief of them all. _Batman Ninja_, is one of **those** movies.
I could probably pick any one aspect I disliked about _Batman Ninja_ and write a full length review based on that single issue, but I generally try to keep these things pretty short, so rather than get into the plot, the deviation from source, the character choices, the dubbing, the animation style, the sexism, the science, the lapses in logic, the design choices, the dialogue, the nonsense, the inconsistencies within its own defined setting, the fact I was so bored at one point I literally fell asleep, or any number of the problems I've either blocked out or to list would require spoilers, I'll skip over all of that and simply say: This is the worst Batman movie I've ever seen.
_Final rating:★ - Of no value. Avoid at all costs._
**TOTAL CRAP**
TLDR
The story itself has a lot of potentials. The outcome is in short total crap. Dialogues are childish and silly. I was wondering if I saw a Power Rangers movie. Seems to me a cultural obsession of Japanese people with Robots. Instead of a focus of deep characters, too many figures made it more confusing. There was slightly nothing about Japanese culture in the movie. Somehow it seems that the whole film was produced by 8 year olds. It has to just be a Ninja movie. If you go that road just add zombies, aliens and Godzilla to it. Total trash in short. Good animations don't make up for a silly and childish fantasy.
It's Batman Manga. It's Batman Japanese style and that really doesn't work.
Some of the character redesigns are good, the Joker and Two-face look great, but the rest are meh and only really work because of the setting, but are otherwise a little less than inspired. I mean, Nightwing they phoned in, his redesign looks like, well, Nightwing present era. Red Robin also has the bare minimum of effort to change from present era Gotham to ancient Japan.
But I guess... Voltron was the reason why it really flopped with me and when the monkeys hit it was just too out there, too manga, too anime, and not batman enough for me.
And the thing is, for a character, Batman would lend himself to Japanese comics a lot easier than a lot of other characters, so to watch it fail like this was painful.
