While I'm not as familiar as with the character as I was watching the show semi-regularly when I was younger, I found this feature adaptation on Amazon the other night and decided I'd try it out. What I found was a mixed bag of alternating extremes. At times extremely interesting and involving writing, at times extremely cliched and melodramatic writing, at times truly beautiful and engaging animation, at times truly terrible animation half-heartedly painted over with stylized freeze-frames.
I found the concept of the story to be pretty great, even if it's not necessarily the most original, a spooky company performing experiments on people to create super humans gone horribly wrong ask a brilliant doctor to help them fix the formula. It's relatively well-done and I was quite drawn in throughout about 75% of the run-time, however, the last 25% almost completely lost me. Where it started out as a moderately subdued and down-to-earth medical mystery/conspiracy theory story, in the last act it felt the need to throw in a cacophony of dramatic exposition dumps and fiery action scenes set to supremely cheesy 80s love ballads.
The last act was beyond ridiculous and wasn't helped by the fact that the incessant freeze-frames for dramatic emphasis tended to occur almost every time a character projectile vomited blood, a side-effect of the aforementioned experiments gone wrong. But as the dramatic conclusion drew near, characters were almost constantly vomiting blood to remind us of the ticking clock and after a while it became frankly hysterical every time it happened.
Despite its occasionally awkward animations and slightly overblown shakespearean dialogue, the movie was a pretty good time and kept me entertained from start to finish. It had quite a few interesting characters who almost all got their time to shine, even if that time was sometimes spent hamming it up a bit in the voice acting department. If you're a big fan of the series you'll probably like it more than I did and if you aren't or were just a casual viewer like I was, you can still get a kick out of it. Black Jack the Movie gets a good 7 out of 10 stars from me.
