However, everything is done either A) by-the-books, B) in spite of the viewer and/or C) lazily, making this an incredibly annoying watch. As for as point A goes, the story is full of cliches of the "assassin/revenge" plotline, and it's easily predictable. If you've seen a film or read a story centered around revenge or assassins (like Kill Bill!), then within 10 to 15 minutes you can easily guess where the anime will be headed.
Point B is what really knocks it down quite a bit. Any substance is replaced with sleaze. As mentioned earlier, the main girl is taken in but in addition to becoming an assassin she's a sex slave to the corrupt detective, and that's not all. Lots of ridiculous blood-splattering, explosions, vomit, hentai, sex jokes, hypocrisy of moral values (and not in a head-turning or unique way; just straight-up stupid character development)... Hell, the jazz soundtrack just makes the "shock" worse. It tries to play it off as cool and edgy, but it just makes the anime feel draggy and idiotic. When people talk about anime being sleazy and filled with sex (as people who know little to none about it are prone to do), they think of anime like Kite.
The biggest point of contention here for me though, is the laziness part. It's 1998; much better animation existed in many different series like Cowboy Bebop, Pokemon, Outlaw Star, Serial Experiments Lain, Trigun. Perfect Blue and Princess Mononoke came out the year before, and as silly as it is to compare an anime from a totally different genre, Neon Genesis Evangelion had very great animation despite being on a small budget. Yet all the faces look dead-eyed, blank, even creepy. Facial expressions are minimal beyond generic happiness, sad, or angry. Audio for the speaking starts nearly a full half-second after lips start moving (I'm hoping this is just Netflix's fault and not the OVA's), yet all other audio is fine. There are frames where everything freezes, not because of a point being proven or something emphasized, but just to fill running time. Even the voices sound strained and half-assed.
I could look past the fact that this is essentially a glorified hentai OVA if it were voiced and animated well. I can get past the (quite frankly disturbing) sex scenes and the shameless gore and lack of a strong story if it looked like the people who worked on it cared. But it's obvious that they didn't care, so I can't learn to care after it ends (beyond writing a review for this). The worst kind of thing to feel for a movie is a lack of caring when it so desperately and clearly wants you to care and feel something beyond annoyance and anger. If no one working on this cares, then neither do I.
