TooKakkoiiforYou_321

I have no idea what happened to this guy but somehow it seems it got bored with the idea of making action-packed movies and instead opted out to make fully blown J-Dramas while pretending to make action movies or tokusatsus, like in this last offering of his. I'm fully sold on superhero tokusatsus with soap opera elements where the action is an equal part of the package together with well done romantic stuff like the Masterpieces with a capital M of the Maestro Toshiki Inoue or his daughter Akiko (at least when she's making at good job and not regurgitating the same old stuff from previous tokusatsu like in the last Gozyuger episodes), but this isn't that. In this failed attempt at making a Cutie Honey kind of superheroine, the action - the main attraction of tokusatsus - is sorely missing and most of the screentime is filled with soap opera a là Bold and Beautiful that, again, has its place in tokusatsus but not when it's not of particularly good quality to begin with and when 98% of the screentime is devoted to it while the action lasts for only a few seconds (and I literally mean for a few seconds, nothing more than that). This crap makes the mediocre (because of the director, not the writer) movie about the Mechanical Violator Hakaider or even the bad Riku Sanjo (an imitator of the Maestro, who is good only when it comes to serialization) Kamen Rider summer specials look like Japan Academy Film Prize movies! If you like your tokusatsus heavy on the romantic side but without forgetting the action, check out the toku Masterpieces of Inoue or Sanjo's Kamen Riders and Super Sentai and avoid this dreck at all costs. It's not worth it.

Exactly, this episode like the entirety of the Sogoroku segment of this show would fit well into the Masterpiece that is the 70's run of Jim Starlin on the Marvel Character warlock like the previous segment on Baby's planet could fit on his 90's run of the Silver Surfer Run (Dynamo City of issues 40/41 anyone?), so much that I expected the Ten Leans clown (satire of Stan Lee) from that one to appear in this. Also, the racoons are very reminescent of Pip the troll from that same series. As a cherry on the cake, FINALLY! It only took 433 episode for an enemy who doesn't use the Dragon Balls to get younger, be immortal or generically conquer the world to appear but it happened, in the form of the charismatic villain Baby Vegeta to recreate the planet from which he originated (it wasn't the planet Vegeta, like the description of this episode on here suggests). So much for people hating on this show because it added something the greatest writer of all times Akira Toriyama (irony mode on, being a big fan of the Dragon Ball IP doesn't mean not aknowledging the true quality of the writing of the guy) couldn't envision all by himself!

I came up to this movie because a character in the first (and only, the second one is terrible, sexy shots of Balalaika's legs in episode 2 permitted) Black Lagoon series mentions the series this movie spawned in the original japanese language in episode 11 as a series he enjoyed when he lived in Japan. Unfortunately, this movie turned out to be a contrived borefest of epic proportions that make the stupid complaints about the unbelievability of what is going on in the first Black Lagoon series (I have no idea what people expects from an animated series) completely disappear because nothing of this movie makes a lick of sense in any way, shape or form. Also there's an overabundance of the typical tropes that you expect from the prison genre, with the usual stuff of a prisoner pretending to be ill to get the attention of a guard, two guys using the railroad to free themselves from the chains, etc. I get it, this was probably cheap entertainment stuff not to be taken seriously, but still it's extremely outdated by today's standards and I don't recommend this movie one bit. I guess I won't look at the following 16 (!) sequels if this is the "quality" of the original.