The Madness Face Castles The Monkeys The Joker Mecha Battle

Batman Ninja: A Fried Brain Review

The Post-Credits Confusion

Okay. My brain is just… fried. Scrambled. I don't even know what I just watched. I'm sitting here on my couch, the credits are rolling on Netflix, and my cat is giving me this look like, "Are you okay, human?" and I honestly don't know the answer. It feels like my synapses have been rearranged by a chaotic tornado. I blinked and my life changed.

Batman. Ninja. BATMAN. NINJA. That's all I could think when it started. I was like, okay, cool, anime style, I'm here for it. Then they get thrown back in time. Fine. Par for the course for a comic book plot, right? Time travel is old hat for the Dark Knight. But then… then it just goes completely off the rails.

All of a sudden every single villain is a feudal lord in Japan? And they have these giant castles that are also their faces? Two-Face's castle is literally split down the middle. My brain short-circuited for a second. I had to pause it. Just sat there in the quiet of my living room, staring at the paused image of a giant, half-scarred castle, and just… processed. I tried to apply logic to it. I failed. The logic simply does not exist here.

Property	Details
Movie Title	Batman Ninja (2018)
Platform	Netflix
Status	Fried Brain / Unadulterated Chaos
Duration	85 Minutes of Nonsense
Companion	Loki (The Cat - concerned)

Architecture of Madness

It's not just Two-Face. The whole aesthetic is designed to drive you insane. Joker has a castle. Penguin has a castle. It's like a theme park designed by a madman. The sheer creativity on display is terrifying. The way they merge traditional Japanese feudal architecture with these grotesque, twisted versions of Gotham's rogues is… I don't even know. It's too much. It's like looking directly into the sun, but the sun is wearing a purple suit.

Character	Feudal Title	Castle Feature
Two-Face	The Warlord	Split down the middle, half scarred.
Joker	The Laughing Lord	Chaotic, colorful, towering grin.
Penguin	The Merchant	Ships incorporated into stone structures.
Gorilla Grodd	The Shogun	A massive fortress of power.

The Monkey Police

And the monkeys. Oh my god, the monkeys. All of Gotham's police force and villains get turned into these… these super-intelligent, weapon-wielding monkeys. At first, I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen. I was literally laughing out loud. "Monkeys? Really?" But then… then I was kind of into it? Like, yeah, of course, the Monkey Police are a thing now. Why not? It’s anime. Logic is a suggestion here.

I leaned so far forward during that big monkey army battle, my back is killing me now. My blanket pooled around my ankles. I was completely invested in the fate of these damn monkeys. Seeing Commissioner Gordon transformed into a monkey but still holding onto his sense of duty? It’s emotional. It’s stupid. It’s everything. The choreography of the fight scenes involving hundreds of monkeys swinging on ropes is actually breathtaking, despite the absurdity of the subject matter.

The Silent Laugh

There's this one shot that's just burned into my mind. It's a close-up of Joker, but he's in this elaborate samurai garb, and he's laughing, but the laugh is totally silent for a split second before the sound hits you. The animation style just makes his eyes these huge, swirling pools of madness. I literally shuddered. It was so unsettling and brilliant all at once.

It reminded me of this one time when I was a kid, I went to a haunted house and this clown just stood perfectly still at the end of a hallway, staring at me, not moving a muscle, and that was so much scarier than if he'd jumped out. The stillness. That shot of Joker had that same energy. It was… a lot.

Honestly, I thought I hated the Joker's design at first. It's so over-the-top, even for him. The hair, the makeup, the robes. But now that I'm sitting here thinking about it… was it actually genius? I don't know. I'm questioning my entire reality right now. I thought I loved that part, but now that I'm typing this… was it actually kind of dumb? I don't know. Maybe it's both. Maybe this whole movie is both.

Bats vs. Monkeys: The End

And don't even get me started on the ending. SPOILERS, I guess, but you need to be warned. They build up this massive, earth-shattering final battle, and then it's resolved with… a giant bat-shaped mecha fighting a giant monkey-shaped mecha that's also a castle? And Batman's mecha is powered by… bats? Of course. It's so stupid. It's so profoundly, beautifully stupid.

I was grinning like an idiot. My cat, Loki, jumped onto my lap right at the climax, probably because I was vibrating with pure, unadulterated what-the-hell energy, and I just hugged him. I needed to anchor myself to something real. The scale of the destruction, the sheer impossibility of the physics involved—it was sensory overload. The animation budget clearly went into these final ten minutes, and it paid off in a way I never expected.

Releted this post - Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League

The Fever Dream Conclusion

This whole experience was just pure, uncut chaos injected directly into my eyeballs. It felt like a fever dream. The kind you have when you're sick and eat a weird combination of food right before bed. One minute it's a stunningly beautiful, hand-painted landscape of feudal Japan, the next minute Gorilla Grodd is riding a giant, mechanized horse and firing lasers. There is no in-between. There is no safety rail.

I'm not even sure if it was "good." The plot makes zero sense if you think about it for more than two seconds. The character motivations are all over the place. But my god, was it an EXPERIENCE. I feel like I need to go watch a black-and-white French New Wave film just to recalibrate my brain. Or maybe I should just watch it again. Right now. (Honestly, I'm tempted to just hit replay on Netflix and let the madness wash over me one more time.)

My head is pounding. In a good way? I think?

Okay. I'm done. I need to go stare at a wall for an hour.

RATING: 7/10
Minus 3 points for logic, plus 10 points for the monkeys.

-Alex