from Patreon: Batman: Soul of the Dragon review

There’s a new Batman movie in theatres, and in honor of that, here’s my review of the DC animated movie that was released in January 2021, and which I simply adored. It’s a total 70s movie, and I’m here for it. This review appeared on my Patreon in January 2021, and for just $1/month, you can get monthly movie reviews — for the last few months, I’ve reviewed Moonstruck, In the Heights, Black Widow, The Suicide Squad, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Luca, Eternals, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Encanto, Ferry, Turning Red, Free Guy, A Goofy Movie, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And for more, you also get cat pictures, TV reviews, excerpts from my works in progress, vignettes featuring my original characters, and first looks at my first drafts! Check it out and please consider being my patron!

Denny O’Neil died last year. One of the best comics writers and one of the best comics editors in the business, one of Denny’s favorite tropes to play with as a writer was characters who trained in the martial arts. He created the character of Richard Dragon, first in the 1974 novel Dragon’s Fists, then adapted him to comics for DC. In the pages of Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter—published starting in 1975, which was the height of the kung fu craze following the rise of Bruce Lee’s popularity—O’Neil also created the characters of O-Sensei (the title character’s mentor), Lady Shiva, and Ben Turner (a.k.a. the Bronze Tiger).

O’Neil would later use both Dragon and Shiva extensively in his brilliant run on The Question. Shiva became a major player in the Batman titles after that, and the Bronze Tiger was a founding member of the modern incarnation of the Suicide Squad.

As a tribute to O’Neil, Warner Bros. Animation has done a Batman animated movie that explicitly takes place at the same time that Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter was published, and which features Batman teaming up with Dragon, Turner, Shiva, and O-Sensei. Jeremy Adams’s script shows an impressive facility for the time period, nailing the plot, the script, and the slang with impressive verve.

The movie is a pastiche of 70s horror comics, 70s kung fu movies, and 70s spy thrillers. The opening is straight-up James Bond, with Dragon on a covert mission to get some files from the safe of a mansion in the middle of a big party. It comes complete with spy tricks (getting someone’s fingerprints for a print-scanning lock), disguises, gambling, hand-to-hand combat, and a big explosion at the end.

The plot is pretty much an excuse to go from fight scene to fight scene, but there’s some characterization. In this tale, Batman is still a relatively new hero, with Bruce Wayne having trained under O-Sensei in Nanda Parbat. (That locale has been a remote site that has been a place to find enlightenment, gain badass martial arts skills, or both in various DC comics, TV shows, and movies over the decades.) Wayne trained alongside Dragon, Turner, Shiva, and two others, Jade Nguyen and Rip Jagger, who are versions of Cheshire and Judomaster from the comics. O-Sensei is training them to protect the Earth from Naga, a demon kept in check by a mystic gate that O-Sensei guards. But Jagger is secretly part of a cult that wishes to free Naga, and he kills Nguyen to open the gate, forcing O-Sensei to enter the gate and sacrifice himself to close it again.

Years later, Dragon finds out that the Kobra cult (to which Jagger belonged) has the gate now. He recruits Wayne, discovering that he’s Batman, and they then go to Shiva—now a crime boss, and possessor of the soul sword that is needed to open the gate. The bad guys take it, and then they recruit Turner, who it turns out knows that Kobra has a chosen one who was being raised from childhood to become the one who frees Naga. But Turner couldn’t kill an innocent kid. However, that innocent kid has grown up to be a psychopath (at one point, he kills a hooker with poisonous snakes after he pays her).

I honestly feel like Warner Bros. decided to make this movie with me in mind, because holy crap is this Keith catnip. I grew up in the 1970s, and still have massive amounts of affection for the popular culture of the era. I’m also a martial artist, a third-degree black belt in karate [note in 2022 when reposting: now a fourth-degree black belt….. —KRAD], and have always had an affinity for martial arts stories. And I’m also a massive fan of O’Neil’s work, and Adams channels O’Neil’s voice here beautifully, particularly with the title character.

One of the hallmarks of O’Neil’s writings of Batman over the years has been that he’s always been aware of Batman’s vulnerabilities. Most of the interpretations of Batman have him as a brilliant polymath who is always in control, or at the very least is always one step ahead of everyone, whether it’s to humorous effect (the 1950s comics, the 1960s TV show) or to be more serious (pretty much every iteration of the character after Frank Miller’s Dark Knight and “Year One” stories in the 1980s). But O’Neil always remembered that Batman was created in an alley where a little kid saw his parents gunned down. O’Neil also created Talia al-Ghul, the daughter of Ra’s al-Ghul, whose tragic love for Batman constantly proved a vulnerability to the dark knight detective.

Adams gives us a very young Batman. This isn’t the confident veteran hero that we’ve seen voiced by Kevin Conroy and Jason O’Mara and Jeremy Sisto and the like. David Giuntoli plays him as a younger man who’s still trying to get his anger and obsession under control.

He’s also a supporting player in his own movie, which I’m actually okay with, as Dragon, Shiva, and Turner are all more interesting characters. In fact, all three of them could have used a bit more fleshing out—how did Shiva become a crime boss? why don’t we see more of Turner’s life? why was Dragon in particular with O-Sensei so long? But Mark Dacascos as Dragon, Michael Jai White as Turner (he played the same role in live action on Arrow), and Kelly Hu as Shiva (she previously voiced the character in the Batman: Arkham Origins videogame) all do superb voice work, giving the characters more depth than the script really has time to grant them. O-Sensei, however, is given plenty of depth by the great James Hong, whom Adams writes with a mischievous wit that is a clichéd but still welcome variation on the sub-fortune-cookie nonsense we usually get from such characters (including the comics iteration all too often).

The story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it doesn’t really need to, and that’s honestly not the problem anyhow. The problem is the ending. The stupid fucking movie ends on a cliffhanger! Our heroes enter the gate, the door closes behind them, and I figure we’re about to get the climactic battle between the four protagonists and Naga. Instead, they pose as if ready to fight, and then the credits roll.

Now maybe they’re setting up for a sequel, but I have the feeling they just wanted to end it all open like that, and feh! I wanted the big-ass fight at the end!

However, up until the ending, this is a great movie. The music, the script, the design, all of it just nails the era being portrayed. If you’re looking for a story with Batman as the main character, you may be disappointed—Batman’s role is supporting, truly; the movie is written as if Dragon is the protagonist. But if you’re looking for a throwback to a time of fight scenes, satanic cults, and espionage, along with fashions that will make you say, “dig them crazy threads, baby,” this is definitely the movie for you.

Batman: Soul of the Dragon is available for sale on Prime and DVD and Blu-Ray. [note in 2022 when reposting: it’s also available for streaming on HBO Max —KRAD]