Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail Blu-ray Movie Review

Running, gunning, slicing, dicing, and gunning some more. All in a bloody day's work...

Reviewed by Kenneth Brown September 8, 2013

Less a third season and more a Season 2.5, Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail picks up where the series proper left off, albeit with a few gallons of blood, some leftfield fan service, and a number of unconvincing changes to the BL universe and characters. Chief among those changes rests on the shoulders of poor Rock, who's suddenly and inexplicably transformed into a dramatically different man of action, and once-ice-cold Roberta, who's taken off her meds, marinated in crazy, and loosed on the anime populous as an unhinged psychopath. (The latter admittedly being an arguably fascinating transformation, if you take it at face value.) The result is a bloodier, more explosive story, but one that isn't as satisfying. It resembles Black Lagoon in part, but not in whole. For some, exploring fresh paths will represent a welcome shift, or at least an interesting new direction. For others, though, it will come as a sucker punch; leaving its mark, yes, but bruising the very faces of those who've come to call the series one of their favorites.

Deadly assassin-turned-maid Roberta (voiced by Michie Tomizawa) returns to the criminal's paradise of Roanapur dead set on revenge, no matter the cost. Against a backdrop of violent chaos, the smugglers of the Lagoon Company team up with Roberta's employer to save her... or, if all else fails, at least stop her bloody rampage.

Oddly enough, fans will be beside themselves trying to keep up with the ever-shifting rules of the Black Lagoon game, while newcomers will of course be oblivious to Blood Trail's callbacks to the first two seasons of the series. Both camps will feel a bit lost, although newcomers will find it easier to enjoy Roberta's rampage for its cheap thrills and seedy action, regardless of what background information they lack. And with each episode indulging in plenty of exposition, they won't be lost for long. Alas, I fear Rock is lost, and may have climbed too far down the rabbit hole to find his way out. The OVA episodes value blood geysers, brutal violence and sexy killers over anything more substantive, and the sun-baked neo-noir gunplay and intrigue of the first two seasons is now strictly stylistic, nothing more.

Perhaps the promise of ultraviolence and the influx of unhinged bloodlust proved distracting to the creative team. It's all blunt force trauma this time around (think a no-holds-barred Trigun, minus the light tone and aversion to body counts), with little in the way of slick storytelling or clever twists and turns. It isn't a complete disappointment, and still clips along with enviable ferocity. But with so many characters and factions vying for attention, so many competing interests and motivations, so many sidelined subplots, and so much time devoted to maniacal murder sprees, five episodes just doesn't cut it. It's decent enough, I suppose. But it could've and should've been so much more.

Roberta's Blood Trail episodes include:

• Collateral Massacre: Roberta's master has been killed and now Roberta wants vengeance. Her young master, Garcia (Kazue Ikura), is simply desperate to bring her back home. Knowing that bringing her back will require help, he seeks Rock's aid. Will Rock (Daisuke Namikawa) accept the job?
• An Office Man's Tactics: Roberta is preparing to go to war, which sends everyone in Roanapur into a panic. Even the various mafia groups are nervous about their unwelcome guest. If Roberta went to war with the U.S.A. in Roanapur, the city would be changed forever.
• Angels in the Crosshairs: Rock and Revy (Megumi Toyoguchi) manage to track down Roberta, but it’s too late to stop the war. Later, Garcia is severely traumatized by witnessing the brutality of his beloved maid in action.
• Oversaturation Kill Box: Garcia emerges from a state of shock to seek revenge against the Americans, Revy is injured during an attempted ambush, and Rock continues pulling the strings that lead to a bloody final showdown.
• Codename Paradise, Status MIA: The violence reaches a fever pitch as Roberta stalks the army through the pitch black jungle. Rock has a plan to forever silence the criminal underworld of Roanapur, but it might just prove deadly.

Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Roberta's Blood Trail cuts a swath of semi-gorgeous destruction on Blu-ray with a problematic 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 video presentation. To be clear from the outset, the encode itself doesn't seem to be the problem; that begins with the original Madhouse animation, which sacrifices crispness and clarity in service of style, evocative lighting and cinematic flair, and ends with a series of issues (presumably) inherent to the source, including at-times severe macroblocking and banding. Hardly a shot or scene goes by in which smoke, dust, shower steam, interior walls, night skies, blood sprays and even faces aren't riddled with eyesores. More often than not, the culprit is the digital lighting techniques applied to the animation, but sometimes it simply appears to be the result of a compressed source. FUNimation can't really do much to correct such issues, but each one takes its toll nonetheless. Fortunately, it's not a complete loss. Colors have been preserved nicely, saturation isn't overbearing and, if the animators' intended it to be seen, it's present and accounted for. Black levels are tragically dingy, but that too is an artistic Madhouse choice, and contrast is dull, as it's meant to be. All told, Roberta's Blood Trail isn't nearly as striking as its action, ultraviolence and character designs, and drifts a bit too close to a DVD-esque presentation to wow high definition anime fans.

Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Roberta's Blood Trail features two lossless audio options: an English dubbed Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround track and an original Japanese-language Dolby TrueHD 2.0 stereo mix. This is a fairly standard practice for FUNimation, and fans will have to continue hoping for the day to come when every anime release offers the best of both worlds in 5.1 surround. Even so, both tracks deliver voices that are clean and clear on the whole, effects that pierce the soundscape with intensity and immediacy, and music that's neatly prioritized with the action. The 5.1 English dub naturally provides the most exciting sonic experience, with fittingly aggressive LFE-supported violence and gunplay, assertive rear speaker activity (limited as it sometimes is), and an immersive soundfield (or rather a soundfield). The voice actors sound a tad detached from it all -- no surprise here -- but anime junkies should be quite used to such trivial shortcomings by now. Ultimately, there isn't a lot of room to complain. There's only room to want more.

Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only extras of note are a clean closing with "Johnny Comes Marching Home" (HD, 1 minute) and a Roberta's Blood Trail U.S. trailer (HD, 2 minutes). There's a smattering of additional FUNimation trailers too, but sadly nothing more.

Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail could've been the best in the series thus far, with a killer tale of revenge, more film-like pacing, more focused character development, and a brutally efficient string of shootouts, knife fights and kill-shots. Instead, it limps along, bleeding out and scrambling for ammunition. It isn't a failure, or even a botched outing. It just doesn't deliver on the series' potential or offer fans a continuation of the story and mercenaries they've come to know and love so well. FUNimation's Blu-ray release isn't all that impressive either, unfortunately. While its lossless audio tracks are quite good, its video presentation suffers and its supplemental package is almost non-existent. Here's hoping for more from Black Lagoon the next time Madhouse decides to return to Roanapur.