Batman Ninja (2018)

the JoshMeister's Rating
⭐️

1 out of 5 stars: "Terrible!"

the JoshMeister's Review
Batman Ninja (2018) is a direct-to-video animated film featuring Gotham's Caped Crusader. The cover art depicts Batman in a samurai-esque costume removing a katana sword from a sheath, which actually looks pretty cool.

The plot, though? Not so much.

For one thing, time travel is a major story element. As someone who knows a bit about actual time-travel theory, that automatically raises red flags for me. Movies and TV shows tend to do a poor job of attempting any realism or even sticking to their own internal rules of how time travel supposedly works. But depending on how good the rest of the movie is, I can sometimes cut it some slack (for example, the Back to the Future films have awfully silly and unrealistic time travel depictions, but the movies are so much fun that it doesn't ruin them for me). Anyway, Batman Ninja has nonsensical time travel, but nothing else about the movie makes up for it.

Setting aside time travel, there are so many other unbelievable, and often downright confusing, elements in Batman Ninja. Granted, it's a cartoon, but that doesn't account for the worst bits.

To properly illustrate how bad it is, I have to give a couple of brief examples (at the risk of minor spoilers, but for a film this bad I don't think any readers should be too concerned about that). At one point in the movie, Batman is deceived by a mind-numbingly bizarre Joker scheme, which doesn't even remotely fit the character of the Dark Knight, a highly intellectual person who would not be so inclined to trust his archenemy. At another point, there is a battle between the good and bad guys' mecha-kaiju (i.e. giant humanoid robots controlled by people inside, à la the Power Rangers' Megazord) that comes completely out of the blue—and somehow actual bats apparently fuse together to help form Batman's mech. It's wild. A few elements of the movie are so insane or utterly bewildering that you may honestly wonder whether the movie was actually written by an artificial intelligence experiment, or maybe the writer's direct adaptation of a fever dream.

So, my recommendation? If you have friends who enjoy watching bad movies, or anything involving Batman or Feudal Japan, invite them over to watch the movie with you so you can laugh at it together. It's quite literally laughably bad, so you might as well enjoy it for what it is.

MPAA Rating
"Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, and for some suggestive material"

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How to watch

 * Rent or buy Batman Ninja on Amazon Prime Video (instant streaming)
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