All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. This review covers the English Dub versions of Black Lagoon Season 1 and Black Lagoon: The Second Barrage. This review contains language that some readers may find upsetting or offensive discretion is advised. Call Black Lagoon the delinquent of the Class of 06. In theory its the story of everyman Rokuro Rock after the first episode or so and from here on out getting caught up in the hyperviolent crime world of the fictional Thai sin city of Roanapur. In practice Black Lagoon is both broader and simpler. If you deign to imagine every crime thriller of the past 35 years tossed into a blender and animated in a midaughts style youve already got the gist of the show. Lagoon is not by any means a complicated anime. To put it the way that one of the dubs dramatic narrated moments might its a show that follows only one real rule: if the narrative is getting sluggish have someone bust in with a gun. 880https://i.ur.com/Scppuys.png Rock The series follows a core cast of four who collectively make up the mercenary Lagoon Company. The aforementioned Rock a Japanese salaryman who is kidnapped as an incidental detail in a job gone wrong. Hed be your straight man the person with a moral compass thats closest to normal and a fondness for white buttonup work shirts and ties. Then theres Revy a ChineseAmerican girl from New York and a loose cannon in almost every possible sense of the term. Shes the wild one a firearm expert who favors a pair of pistols hence her nickname TwoHands swears like a lumberjack who just lost a leg and just generally doesnt give a fuck about anything. Theres Benny a JewishAmerican IT tech who is pardon the term the chill one. And rounding out the cast is Lagoon Company captain Dutch an AfricanAmerican noticing a trend? exsoldier defined by a pair of sunglasses and a cool head. 880https://i.ur.com/nM39Ci3.png Revy Calling the cast colorful is underselling them. Revy is the most obviously characterful but all four members of the core cast perform strongly even Benny. Rock in particular manages to usually nail the unenviable task of being the nonaction character in an action show. Often hes able to talk his way out of things that by all rights he really shouldnt be especially as the series nears its end. Outside of the main four there are a number of Bcharacters that help color the world of the series. Among these are Sister Eda a promiscuous nun employed by the guntoting Ripoff Church who essentially serves as a second Revy. The absolutely riveting Balalaika head of the Mafiyaaffiliated Hotel Moscow. The indestructible and outrageouslyheavilyarmed Colombian maid and we find out exFARCEPhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RevolutionaryArmedForcesofColombia guerrilla Roberta. Mob bosses like the Triad head Mr. Chang and a number of more rarelyappearing characters help too. On the antagonistic side youve got NeoNazis terrorists the ItalianAmerican Mafia and a smorgasbord of other Action Movie villains. Its here worth mentioning the strong dub performances. Almost everyone is voice acted bare minimum solidly and many are actually very good. Of special note are those by Dutch whose actor Dean Redman is probably better known as the voice of various animated Nick Fury incarnations nowadays and that of Balalaika. Patricia Drake best known as Trunks in Dragonball Z brings an absolutely bonechilling aura to her performance that makes the character simply magnetic to watch. Its arguably the shows strongest vocal performance overall and its a shame that its one of just a handful that she ever brought to the medium being mostly a western animation VA. 880https://i.ur.com/TJwtH8E.png Balalaika Finally theres that of Roberta whose cold performance is quite literally accented by a slight Colombian Spanish accent her vocal tone really selling the characters steely strength. The script on the other hand is a bit of a bumpier ride. There are a lot of obviouslyaltered or adlibbed pieces of dialogue. References to American popculture like Sears and western films abound and the cursing is colorful but believable. On the other hand the script shows its age with liberal peppering of terms like retarded around. Its the sort of thing where its hard to hold it against the show per se since whats considered acceptable language has changed over time but if youre a certain sort of person its liable to make you wince a bit. On the other hand one can definitely hold the character of Shenhua who is Taiwanese against the show. Shenhuas actual vocal performance is competent but shes dubbed in a highly stereotypical yellowface accent that is just not a good look for anyone involved. Not helping is the fact that her inseries nickname is Chinglish. Shenhua is the one point where the shows script inarguably passes a line across rude humor and fully sails out into downright offensive and its a serious mark against an otherwise very strong dub. Visually the show is competent but not terribly innovative. It mostly works in muted color palettes and while some of the action sequences it executes are a bit atypical for anime theres really nothing groundbreaking here. Craft not new ideas carry Black Lagoon in this department. The CGI cars havent aged superwell but its hard to blame the show itself for that and other than occasional overobvious tricks like frameshaking to simulate vibrating movement theres really nothing to complain about in the visuals department. So what of the actual plot? Well Black Lagoon is divided into two 12episode seasons the second given the subtitle The Second Barrage and further subdivided into several arcs each each of which is usually 3episodes long though the one that closes out the show is longer. The first season is on the whole the stronger one by a good margin. Theres nothing quite like Dutch and Remy turning a boatful of blowhard NeoNazis into a shooting gallery or Lagoon Companys encounter with Roberta who comes in with a briefcase and meido getup full of heavy weaponry to tear Loanapur apart looking for her missing young master. When in the mode of pure fun Black Lagoon is a blast. Unfortunately the show from time to time tries to dip its toes into having a message and its here where Black Lagoon makes its shortcomings known. Much of the discussion on the nature of power and what would drive people to lives of crime in the series is essentially empty philosophizing. At best its a time and interestkiller. At its worst it comes across as actively patronizing. This reaches its peak with the shows overall low point the absolutely miserable Vampire Twins arc that makes up the first three episodes of Second Barrage. 880https://i.ur.com/NDVs5sK.png One of the twins. Note her rifle its the best thing about the arc. The Vampire Twins arc is a culmination of the series worst impulses. It mixes a plot device that strains credulity and absolutely annihilates good taste even for this show. It stars two Romanian twins who have become expert assassins after a life of being forced to murder other children on camera for snuff films both of whom sometimes switch to being the other by passing a wig back and forth. When one dies the other pulls double duty until she dies too. Both give the entirety of Roanapur a run for their money up to and including Hotel Moscow before they finally take the kids down. Its a bizarre combination of cartoonish and relentlessly miserable. The former works for Black Lagoon again see the Roberta arc that closes out the first season but the latter really doesnt. It can be hard to pinpoint the exact line between gritty and violent media thats still fun and gritty and violent media thats just dull but during this arc which I must also mention features Balalaika having to shake down minor character and sex club owner Rowen for literal child pornography so she can figure out who these kids are that line has well been crossed. The arcs sole redeeming feature is that its the first appearance of The World of Midnight the haunting acapella track that has become Black Lagoons aural signature in the years since its premiere. Sadly the Vampire Twins arc may well have been something of a portent of what was to come for the seinen action genre as that level of willful bad taste is now the norm for that sort of manga. Its hard not to draw at least a small line from this arc to the sheer pointlessness of something like say Gleipnirhttps://anilist.co/review/2374 or Magical Girl Spec. Ops. Asukahttps://anilist.co/review/4305. Elsewhere in Second Barrage its a more mixed bag. An entertaining arc about a counterfeiter named Jane is a fun throwback to the first season but its over a bit too quickly. The aforementioned Yakuza arc that closes out the season is interesting in its intricacy and while its own ruminations on the question of why do people do bad things? feel much more earned than those of the Vampire Twins arc it still fails to make the connections necessary to turn those from merely food for thought into a genuine thematic thesis. It just cant tie these ideas together well enough and the overall ending again feels rather grimforthesakeofit rather than grimforareason two categories separated by an admittedly fine line. Its probably a bit too rude to call Black Lagoon on the whole philosophically empty but it really comes up short in these areas. 880https://i.ur.com/AXDZj39.png This is a still of arc character Yukio but I also like to think of it as a visual metaphor for the weaker parts of the series. So is Black Lagoon a bad show? Certainly not while it fails at really digging into the broader psychological issues it tries to on a purely narrative level its endlessly entertaining. It feels a little backhanded to say that a show is watchable since technically anything is watchable but Black Lagoon has a cant put it down quality that a lot of more thematically engaging anime admittedly dont have which prevents me from calling it bad. On the contrary taken as pure entertainment its actually pretty damn good. There are worse things for an anime to be than that. If youre looking to pass a few nights and pop some popcorn and are capable of putting up with its flaws Black Lagoon is worth a spin. It may not be the classic that it occasionally gets bandied about as but its good solid hotbarrelled fun.