Bloody Escape

This felt undercooked. There are a lot of things happening here, at least theoretically, since the world is supposed to be complex, but, I barely got the gist of it, possibly because I did not watch "Estab-Life", which is supposed to be like a prequel. I knew about the connection beforehand, but Bloody Escape looked like a standalone.

And it kind of is. The main characters are new, and only the "Extractors" are from previous anime, and they do not have that much screen time. I would not even call them "supporting" characters. Unfortunately, the main characters have just about the same amount of depth. There are some attempts to make them deeper with some plot-twists but they feel forced, and I am not sure they really fit.

On the other hand there is a vampire turned cyborg here, so maybe that's a plus? I think it does help with the fights, that do look decent, but they do lose some of the charm due to lack of plot-weight behind them. All they got are looks, and even those probably won't be for everyone with the 2.5D style, that the movie has.

It's kind of sad that I did not enjoy it in the end. On paper it could have been some survival story with betrayals and double-crossing, with complex politics... But maybe they needed more than 100 minutes for this? Or maybe they should have thrown away some of the complexities? We'll never know.