What tips it just to this side of palatability - and I think that might apply to a live-action adaptation as well - is how it places a character with a strong moral sense at the center of the action, and manages not to make him look like a complete fool for caring. The only difference is the medium, and both animation and comics allow the creator to get away with things that in live action might come off as despicable or irresponsible.īut also worst, for that exact reason: not everyone is a fan of two-gun anti-heroism, and Black Lagoon is unapologetic about fashioning hard-boiled entertainment out of things that might turn stomachs. Best, in the sense that its tropes, storyline, attitude, and execution are close cousins to the sort of gunplay-'n'-guts live-action products that most any Western moviegoer ought to be familiar with. One scared salary man one hard-boiled crew ten thousand bulletsįor the above-cited reasons, Black Lagoon is at the same time one of the best and the worst ways to introduce a newcomer to anime.

SHOGAKUKAN / BLACK LAGOON PROJECT 'Rock': from milquetoast to mercenary.

The only mystery is why the money hasn't been spent yet. There is most everything about Black Lagoon that makes the job easy. There is nothing about it that makes the job hard, save for some of the unsavory subject matter - and in a world of best-selling girls with dragon tattoos and various shades of kinky gray, it's hard to say there is any such thing as unsavory subject matter anymore.

Let me mince no more words: Black Lagoon is the single easiest shoo-in for a live-action adaptation of an anime or manga project that I can come up with at this point in time.

Bruckheimer and Bay miss the memos? And if they did, can some kind soul put them to rights? At best, it's the missing of a bet-one of the easiest, most potentially lucrative, least problematic bets ever in terms of an anime/manga-to-live-action adaptation.

That right there is all the proof you need the world is dysfunctional at worst. I know this to be true because of the mere fact that a live-action Black Lagoon film has not been made, not even so much as been entertained by anyone in either Hong Kong or Hollywood. Some fundamental law of reality has been put out of joint.

Black lagoon season 1 trailer