My eyes are bleeding. In a good way? I don't know. I'm sitting here in the dark, the only light coming from my laptop, which is currently displaying some sketchy streaming site's homepage covered in pop-up ads for Russian dating services. My drink—just a soda, I swear—is spilled all over the floor because I literally jumped out of my skin about an hour ago. My heart is still doing this weird fluttery thing. What did I just watch?
Dude. You know that link Mark sent me? The one with the weird Cyrillic URL and the promise of "NEW BATMAN ANIME 2025 CLICK HERE"? I clicked it. Of course, I clicked it. And my laptop didn't even explode. So there I was, curled up on my couch, trying to get the blanket to cover my feet properly, and this movie starts. *Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League*. The title alone is a fever dream.
It's just... pure, uncut chaos. They're not even trying to hide it. The movie opens with Batman already in feudal Japan, which, fine, we've been here before with the first one. But this time? The Yakuza League. That's the villains. They're not just dressed as yakuza, they ARE yakuza. Penguin has a full-back tattoo of a penguin. A PENGUIN. I paused it right there, just to stare at it. The quality of the stream was garbage, of course, all pixelated and blocky during the dark scenes, which is like, 80% of the movie. I had to squint to even see what was happening. But I could see that tattoo. Crystal clear. That's the universe's sense of humor, I guess.
There's this one shot. I can't get it out of my head. It's Catwoman. She's in this stunning, deep purple silk kimono, but it's slit all the way up to her thigh, and she's holding this futuristic, matte-black submachine gun. The camera just lingers on her for a second, one hand adjusting her ornate hair pin, the other resting on the trigger. It was so cool. It was so dumb. It was the most perfect, ridiculous image I've ever seen. I thought I loved that part, but now that I'm typing this... was it actually just a really cringey attempt to be "edgy"? I don't know. My brain is broken.
It made me think of that time in 8th grade when my art teacher tried to teach us origami. I remember trying to fold this stupid little crane, and my hands are just these clumsy meat hooks, you know? And the paper kept tearing, and I just got so frustrated I crumpled it into a ball and threw it in the trash. And my teacher, Mrs. Gable, she comes over and just looks at the crumpled ball and says, "Sometimes that's art too, Alex." I have no idea why that memory just popped into my head while watching a robot gorilla fight a samurai Batman. It's just... my synapses are firing all wrong right now.
The plot is basically non-existent. Something about a golden city, and a time portal, and the Yakuza League trying to… I don't know, control the sake trade? It doesn't matter. The dialogue is all these stilted, dramatic one-liners that sound like they were translated through three different languages and then back again. But then there's a fight scene. And it's just… breathtaking. The animation is so fluid and visceral, even through the compression artifacts. Batman uses a grappling hook made of bamboo to disarm like twenty guys at once. I leaned so far forward I almost fell off the couch. My cat, Mochi, who was sleeping on my chest, was not pleased. She gave me a look of pure betrayal and stalked off.
Honestly, the sound was half a second off the entire time. Every punch sounded like a wet slap that came a beat too late. It should have been unwatchable. But it kind of… added to it? It made the whole thing feel even more surreal, like I was watching a memory of a movie instead of the movie itself. A bootleg of a dream.
And the climax. Oh my god, the climax. Spoilers, I guess, but you're not going to watch it on a Russian pirate site at 1 AM, so who cares. They build these giant mechs. Of course they do. The Yakuza League has a giant mech that looks like a feudal castle, and Batman has a giant bat-mech. And they fight. It's Pacific Rim but with more silk and honorifics. I was grinning like an absolute idiot. It was the stupidest, most wonderful thing I've ever seen. I was cheering. In my empty apartment. At 2 in the morning. For a giant robot bat. I need to re-evaluate my life choices.
Okay. My brain is officially soup. I feel like I need to watch a documentary about grass growing just to calm down. This movie is a masterpiece of beautiful nonsense. It's a disaster. I loved it. I hated it. I'm going to have weird dreams about yakuza penguins.
8/10.
-Alex
Trailer English - https://youtu.be/QleeDtH_WWE?si=tpLaJ7FMq-IwLgyr
Tra
Review English - https://youtu.be/o-SK9NyrDsQ?si=x1iD4vwvDf_e1hG8
EXPLANATION english - https://youtu.be/GkLEop63feo?si=hRFbKsaQqhpDHu3h
EXPLANATION hindi - https://youtu.be/KAG-33c3pr4?si=GLce7bFX74Mp0TVa
