Marval Movie

Assault on Arkham seems to be making up for lost time on the adult rated DC animated movies. You can truly feel the release the writers and directors are exercising that have been building up for some time.

It opens with The Riddler (Mathew Gray Grubler) on a conversation with Amanda Waller (C.C.H. Pounder). She keeps him talking only so her hit squad can locate him then take him out. Suddenly Batman arrives and and takes out the mercenaries and sends Riddler back to Arkham Asylum, the maximum security mental ward. This leaves Waller with one option, "Assemble Task Force X. We have another suicide mission".

And so the Suicide Squad is assembled. A squad that consists of convicts with no chance of release and are on death row anyway so they give them the messy jobs.

What makes this movie unique is that despite who's name is on the title Batman himself appears very little in the movie. Kevin Conroy returns for the role and even though he appears so seldom he puts his all into every line he has.

The real stars of this movie are Deadshot and Harley Quinn. Neal McDonough as Deadshot is a very convincing leading-man with lots of charisma, style and a serious nature. Hynden Walch takes her second swing at the character of Harley and she is so wonderful in the role, with her Jersey-esq accent and her hilarious, energetic delivery. There are two types of Walch performances, the super spunky sweet and the dark tormented, lucky for her she gets a character that can dance between either or even both effortlessly.

The rest of the squad is comprised of Killer Frost (Jennifer Hale) with the ability to shoot ice beams from her hands a dry scenes of humour, Captain Boomerang (Greg Ellis) just a regular blue collar criminal that lie a pint and throwing boomerangs, King Shark (John DiMaggio) some king of deformed giant that has a taste for human flesh and Black Spider (Giancarlo Esposito) a stealthy vigilante that seeks to kill all the corrupted.

There is also The Joker, this time being played by the biggest and hottest voiceactors of recent years, Troy Baker. Baker is a Joker worthy to stand alongside Heath Ledger and Mark Hamill (to which he sounds very like). He is just as crazy and strangely hilarious as them but also brings his own unique spin on the character. But even though Baker is a great actor he is able to speak the very punchy obrolan and make them knockouts, never did I think I'd ever hear the Joker say "I'm here bitches!" and it be either credible or work and yet it was one of the high point of the movie.

The drawing style in this movie is more obviously more video game based because it is based on the Arkham game franchise. This movie serves as a prequel to the first game (Arkham Asylum) and it fits pretty well. The characters are very graphic and have a distinguished style to them. Even with all the extra lines the animation still had character and was consistently good.

A weird experience happened to me while watching this movie. The environments are based on the Arkham Asylum game and I recognized the places that I had previously navigated around in my video gaming experience. Usually I have watched a movie and then there would be a game of it (Ghostbusters for example) but this time the situation was reversed and it was an experience unlike any other.

This movie is a guy movie, no getting around it. There is as much nudity as they can get away with and it is fe-male nudity, there are gory explosion filled action scenes that appeal the the male mind-set. However unlike a movie like Sin City this movie does not hate woman, it explaoits them a little but they are still capable and are able to even beat up the boys. So for that reason I could proudly eat my steak dinner and raise my beverage to the screen.

Assault on Arkham is short on subtely, absolutely not approbprate for children, somewhat sexist and boarders on explotation. But it is also very entertaining.

Rating: 3 1/2 stars out of 4