Batman Ninja

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.

Like Spinal Tap, Batman Ninja (2018) turns to the Land of the Rising Sun in a bid to inject new life into a creatively depleted franchise. And like Spinal Tap, Batman Ninja is silly and over the top — or at least the English-language version is.

A mishap with Gorilla Grodd’s Quake Engine time displacement machine causes Arkham Asylum, with Grodd, the Joker, Harley Quinn Catwoman, The Penguin, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, and Deathstroke in it, to be sent to feudal Japan. Batman, who was fighting Grodd, arrives two years later; he muses, “Grodd delayed me, and it must have affected the jump.” The delay also gave everyone else time to, among other things, either pick up enough Japanese to make themselves understood, or force everyone in Japan to learn English. That said, I can buy that Bruce Wayne, freak that he is, had at some point in his life taught himself 15th century Japanese just for the hell of it.

So far so good, but then people start coming out of the woodwork whenever the script requires a boost. As many as four of Batman’s previous and current sidekicks plus his butler have all been spirited away as well. It just so happens that “Alfred was in the Batmobile that night,” which means that the Batmobile is also available.

Since when does Batman bring Alfred with him when he goes crimefighting? And for what purpose? Is he Batman’s getaway driver now? And if so, what the fuck can he get away from? And what about the others? Were they holding a meeting of the Batman Sidekick Support Group next door?

At one point, Batman asks, “who else made the time jump?” To quote Gary Oldman, everyone. Everyone the screenplay needs to move the plot forward every time it gets stuck is here. These aren’t cameos; they’re mini deus ex machinas. Even the Penguin’s penguins make an appearance. Penguins are not endemic to Japan, and I very much doubt that the Arkham administration let the Penguin keep his “fine-feathered friends” in his cell, so they must have come from somewhere in Gotham. The question is, why is it that some people, animals, and objects “made the time jump” and others didn’t? According to this film’s “logic,” the entire city should have been whisked away to “ancient Japan.”

The villains have succeeded in turning Edo into a steampunk paradise (or is it dieselpunk? I can never get them straight), each living in a castle/Transforming Mecha and fighting one another for control of Japan. During the climax, the five or six castles are revealed to be parts of a Combining Mecha (complete with a theme song). How is this possible if each bad guy built their castle separately? Grodd has a mind control device, and he “manipulated them into building their fortresses … Where do you think they got the technology?” That doesn’t explain where they got the materials, but whatever.

Grodd can do more than “manipulate” them. He can turn them into full-on automatons at his beck and call. Basically, Grodd wasted two years of in-fighting when he could have had the other villains working together under his influence all along — but had he done that, it would have ruined the plot twist. This movie favors surprise over sense.

By the time Grodd’s “army of monkeys” morph into a “giant samurai” that then merges with an army of bats to form a “mighty batgod,” it has long become more than evident that it’s not possible to take any of this the least bit seriously, even by animated superhero flick standards — but is the movie tongue-in-cheek or just clueless?

There are openly self-aware moments — Joker: “Poor Bats … He’s always risking his life to save ordinary people. If you had just let them die and gone after me instead, maybe you wouldn’t find yourself in such terrible shape.” Batman (deadpanning): “I have no regrets” —, but if this truly were a “Bat-roast” along the lines of The Lego Batman Movie, the film would lampshade its many inconsistencies instead of ignoring them. For example, early on, Catwoman convinces Batman to disguise himself as a Christian missionary, so that he “won’t look too suspicious as a westerner.” It’s true that “a lot of Christian missionaries came to Japan during this era,” but considering what happened to them, it’s kind of a letdown that this isn’t Catwoman setting Batman up.

On the plus side, Batman Ninja is short (although they managed to cram in so much stuff — including a subplot wherein the Joker and Harley hypnotize themselves to trick Batman and, having accomplished that goal, somehow snap themselves out — that it feels longer than its 85 minutes) and looks pretty good — though the latter is perhaps because good old-fashioned Japanese animation needs no translation.