Spoilers ahead.
The story forgets that Nanachi was tortured by Bondrewd after the first act, and her arc never gets a satisfactory conclusion. Worse than that, it seems like she is suddenly perfectly ok with letting Bondrewd continue to torture children once they defeat him. The abused/abuser dynamic looked promising at first, but Nanachi doesnt' really get closure and the movie oddly tries to make the villain likeable at the last second, right after we're shown what he did to Prushka. This bothered me a lot, because I was honestly hoping for her to deliver the final blow and end his reign of terror once and for all... only for them to come up with a lazy excuse as to why they don't just destroy him.
The torture porn becomes too distracting as well. The violence in the anime served a purpose for the most part, but in this it just seems like they torture the main characters for shock value. Hell, they even introduced Prushka, a character who exists exclusively to make the audience feel bad, and who gets removed from the story too quickly for the audience to really care about her. Worst of all is the fact that most of her screentime is spent on flashbacks, so rather than seeing her slowly grow friendly towards the gang she just becomes their super best friend immediately after meeting them.
And don't even get me started on the weird sexual stuff. This movie throws an amazing fight scene with an insane twist at you, then immediately follows it up with a sequence of Prushka suggesting her father has sex with her. I understand that this is based on a manga (which I refuse to read) but if they cut out most of the pedobait from the anime I don't know what stopped them from cutting out this kind of uncomfortable scenes that completely break the immersion because they remind you they're only there so the author can jerk off. It's so distracting, in fact, that I can't stop thinking about it whenever something mildly suggestive happens on screen, because I'm constantly wondering if it's supposed to be sexual in nature, which breaks my immersion immediately.
On the flip side, the animation and character designs are top-notch, and Bondrewd is an amazing villain with a clever and surprising power set that completely subverts much of what the audience thought about him, similarly to Ouzen. There are a few story beats that are really, really interesting, and while the pacing isn't perfect it's not the worst thing in the world either. Perhaps if they cut the pedo crap out of the movie there would be more time for character development.
Oh, and the music is insane. Combined with how great the fight scenes are, this movie shows it can have very compelling action. It's a shame immediately after one of the best fight scenes I've seen for a while it immediately cuts to two kids talking about an adult's penis.
Considerably worse than season 1. Certain scenes make me deeply uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons.
