Tried getting through the first episode of this misguided animated cash-grab, and eventually succeeded, but even at 20 minutes in length it was a bit of a slog. Had to take a few breaks.
The story, such as it is, is a generic killer-with-memory-loss affair you've seen done now over a hundred times, and not even a frame of it comes as a surprise - it opens with a 98-pound girl with amnesia beating up gangs of large men with ease; all the bad guys are white men (well, at least the ones she's allowed to kill) and her only friend is a nerdy black guy she's just met. I swear that Netflix just has a machine now that calculates the 'correct' balance of privilege, oppression, race and gender and generates one of these shows every 7 seconds.
The city backgrounds are very nicely-rendered, with a number of (quite unlikely when you think about it) callbacks to locations from the original movie, but the character animation and voice acting both belong in a video game from 20 years ago. And that's what Black Lotus feels like, really: a video game you can only watch someone else half-heartedly play. Very, very dull.
The story, such as it is, is a generic killer-with-memory-loss affair you've seen done now over a hundred times, and not even a frame of it comes as a surprise - it opens with a 98-pound girl with amnesia beating up gangs of large men with ease; all the bad guys are white men (well, at least the ones she's allowed to kill) and her only friend is a nerdy black guy she's just met. I swear that Netflix just has a machine now that calculates the 'correct' balance of privilege, oppression, race and gender and generates one of these shows every 7 seconds.
The city backgrounds are very nicely-rendered, with a number of (quite unlikely when you think about it) callbacks to locations from the original movie, but the character animation and voice acting both belong in a video game from 20 years ago. And that's what Black Lotus feels like, really: a video game you can only watch someone else half-heartedly play. Very, very dull.