Rasta Blasta (Black Lagoon - The First Barrage (DVD))

Member Name: berlioz II

Product:	Black Lagoon - The First Barrage (DVD)
Date:	21/06/09 (83 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Supremely enjoyable and entertaining action series in its purest form

Disadvantages: Not terribly deep, but who cares

It's been a bad day for Japanese salaryman Rokuro Okajima. First a group of mercenary pirates attack a transport ship he is on after being unwittingly tangled in a smuggling operation. Then he is taken as hostage by the said pirates... or rather by one of them who thinks there might be ransom money to be had. He is then taken to the outlaw city of Roanapur, where violence, crime and death are everyday occurrences, and before he knows it, Rokuro is being shot at, jostled around from one place to the next, abandoned by his employers with a para-military group of killers sent after him, and now the only ones he can trust are the very people who kidnapped him and got him into this mess in the first place. In the expanse of manga and anime, there are some series that thrive at being über-manly; series like Berserk, Ninja Scroll, and certainly one of the purest manifestations of this type of series, Black Lagoon. Black Lagoon is a twelve episode series that is unashamedly manly - the whole of it is like one giant action spectacle where everybody curses their shirts off, guns usually solve most of the problems, and violence is the order of the day. Produced in 2006, and based on the manga of Rei Hiroe, Black Lagoon really gives you nothing in the way of fluffy and sweet... and whatever soft moments there are are usually laced with a certain hardness, emptiness, or a clear sense of nihilism. The series is not deep by any means, and it doesn't try to be like that either. This is pure action fun and the entirety of the enjoyment in the series is derived from the deliriously fast-paced and spectacular scenes of gunfights, chases, explosions, and blood-splattering.

The cast of characters are many and colourful. The main character of Rokuro - who quickly is dubbed as "Rock" - is the fish out of water in this kind of an environment. He is used to his safe life; where he is not respected at work and where getting drunk in a comfortable Japanese bar is about as exciting as it gets. But now being thrown into this world of mercenaries, drug dealers, arms salesmen, and just plain lunatics, he quickly now has to adapt and do what he must to survive where only the tough are allowed to live. Rock is the balancing point of our normal lives when juxtaposed with this place of absurd violence, making him the person we as viewers get the most sober perspectives from as a normal guy thrown into unusual circumstances, and is usually the one who can connect with other people around him that the others are more incapable of. The people Rock finds "support" and "safety" from are the three people of the Lagoon Company he ends up tagging along with, and eventually working for. The leader Dutch is a hulky black man with a perpetually calm air to him, and a clear sense that this is not somebody you mess around with. Not much is known of him, but neither is it really necessary either. It's enough to know he is always on the ball in any given situation. In charge of the more technology-based stuff is Benny, a half-Jewish hacker who "got into a little trouble with the FBI and Mafia", and ended up working for the Lagoon Company after they saved his life. He's generally a laid-back fellow who usually stays away from major fights, but is not really too bothered by the things that happens around him, happily turning a blind eye to the various "illegalities" perpetuated in his profession and conducted by the people around him.

And finally there is Revy "Two Hands", the Chinese-American short-fused gun-nut, who's major way of solving problems is to pull out a gun and shoot the f****** thing away. Out of all the main characters it is Revy who most likely will leave the biggest impression with her splashy persona of being a nihilistic woman with no real other needs other than to have her weapons by her side, and the only times she really seems to find enjoyment out of life is when she gets to shoot at something or someone, which is often and plentiful, and usually perpetuated by the slightest of reasons. The rest of the characters that frequent the series are more like special personalities that appear when needed, while not remaining as standard fixtures to the episodes. The only one who makes habitual appearances throughout is the chief employer of the Lagoon Company, the Russian mafia's Hotel Moscow head Balalaika, a woman raised amid war in Afghanistan, and who has since the fall of Communism taken the top of the criminal totem pole with the help of her former special squad of soldiers. It is she who plays a lot of the most dangerous political crime games, and behind the generally amicable air she has there is always the hint of danger and a don't-****-with-me attitude that is both ruthless and deadly, which is only emphasised as half her face bares a nasty burnt scar.

The series itself is largely constructed of several arcs that usually run from two to three episodes in length, making the series somewhat episodic in nature and in which past arcs are usually never referred to too heavily in any of the succeeding ones past maybe a mention of one scene here or there. The first season episodes largely are divided into:

Episodes 1-2: Rock's kidnapping and joining the Lagoon Company
Episode 3: A minor drug-related episode
Episodes 4-6: The Lagoon Company are hired to retrieve a painting supposedly painted by Hitler from a sunken U-Boat, but then have to fight a bunch of Nazis wanting to use the painting as the means to get their party back in control of the world.
Episode 7: A largely character building episode.
Episodes 8-10: A rich family's chambermaid is coming to get back the family's son, whom the Lagoon Company have been hired to transport to the Mafia.
Episodes 11-12: A terrorist organisation, the Protectors of the Islamic Front, attempts to intercept certain documents that were entrusted to the Lagoon Company to transport to the CIA by the Triad crime boss Mr. Chang.

Of these arcs, the most interesting and fun are also the two longest ones: the Nazi arc and the Maid arc. The former is generally rather amusing as the Nazi wannabes try to get their precious painting first, but are rather more foolish than threatening, suffering from over-confidence and even greater incompetence. Particularly their commander, who is a blustering idiot with a lot of patriotic heart, but not much smarts. And when Dutch and Revy board their ship in order to retrieve their prize, the ensuing shootout is unyielding and efficiently brutal. The latter arc is perhaps the most exciting in terms of pure edge-of-your-seat action extravaganza as the main cast comes face to face with the extremely polite, yet completely unstoppable and brutal chambermaid Roberta coming after her young master. Roberta is bar none one of the most impressive foes this series has in being dressed completely in a heavy maid outfit and wielding a shotgun in her parasol, and how she moves like a Terminator (an allusion made by Rock) with completely unrelenting power, with only one objective in mind: retrieve her charge and kill the opposition.

Still, Black Lagoon is never a series you should take too seriously and a lot of it is toned with a mixture of kick ass action and tongue-in-cheek humour. Revy is often the main source for most of these, both in her reckless way of conducting business and in her habit of easily loosing her patience when confronted with different situations, both friendly and hostile. For instance when a hulking Nazi is doing his usual bad guy speech on the magnificence of his gun that only he knows how to use and how nothing can defeat him and how Revy must be scared right about now, she just looks on at his pompous monologue plainly bored, calmly re-loads her gun, and then simply shoots him right between the eyes: "Shut up! Are you done yet? What are you? A TV preacher?" Or as her stubborn pride can't take being second best or insulted, she often has a tendency to explode in a magnificent way that is usually not very productive, as in Episode 7's negotiations with Sister Yolanda, the Mother Superior of the Church of Violence, in which she pulled her gun as her style of bargaining for a standoff between the similarly gunhappy Sister Eda, a situation Rock however managed to diffuse through a bit of diplomacy. Or when she ends up in a person-to-person fight against Roberta in Episode 10, the results end up being very rough and tumble as both are extremely tough and unrelenting in not wanting to loose to one another.

What is especially nice about this series is the criminal world that is built around the characters. Roanapur is a town where all the major criminal misfits tend to congregate at, and it is here that a miniature world is assembled that is completely different to the normal world, yet has a great feeling of reality to it. The different crime organisations (Balalaika's Hotel Moscow, Mr. Chang's Triad, Abrego's Manisarela Cartel, Mother Yolanda's Church of Violence, and other smaller criminal branches) create a sense of depth to the town of Roanapur where all these organisations at times compete with one another, and at others collaborate in various ways, each being after power and money through what ever means available, while their leaders often have widely varied pasts (like Balalaika's military history or Mr. Chang's police background). And as you might expect, many of these organisations house many smaller underlings that bring a lot of uniqueness to these surroundings that would otherwise make this place considerably less interesting. One of the absolutely most fun of these hench people are the duo working for Mr. Chang's in the last arc: the blade-wielding Shenhoa, who strikes a little rivalry with Revy that is hugely amusing, and her driver Leigharch, who usually gets so high that he starts seeing various pop-culture hallucinations ("Jimi Henrix commands! Have to kill a few Klingons! Raquel Welch shows the way. Where are you taking me? The nudist beach?"). And, of course, there's the barkeep Bao, who's bar Yellow Flag always seems to end up destroyed... of which he usually blames Revy.

So Black Lagoon is perfectly fitting for anybody into lots of action. The action is indeed rather unrelenting, and this combined with its entertaining attitude and memorable characters makes this series something I think many would enjoy. There's no romantic subplots, or anything that could make you too confused on a plot level, while character development is not stellar, but satisfactory regardless for a series of this type, particularly when it comes to finding out a little about Revy's past and how Rock grows into accepting this violent way of life as his own now, a living he struggles in getting to grips with throughout the series. The voice acting is strong throughout, particularly with the main quartet of the humble Daisuke Namikawa as Rock, the foul-mouthed Megumi Toyoguchi as Revy, the calm Tsutomu Isobe as Dutch, and the gentle Hiroaki Hirata as Benny, while the secondary cast certainly doesn't pale in comparison. The animation quality is also of a very high standard, though I'm not sure why all the cars have been rendered with CGI, making their movements somewhat too fluent and sticking out from the surrounding 2-D animation. Sound effects play a large part in creating a distinct ambiance, particularly the sound of Revy's trademark twin Beretta 92FS "9mm Sword Cutlass" pistols, while the music is largely either heavy rock backings or a hauntingly desolate synth piece reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, mostly used in the end credits. All in all, Black Lagoon is an infinitely entertaining series that is just plain action from start to finish without anything hugely complex about it. Just some good ol' blood-splattering, gun-toting, swearing, smackeroo fun guaranteed to provide a boatload of entertainment from start to finish.

© berlioz, 2009

Summary: "You are the first piggy. Röf Röf."