(contd)
I remember when Devil May Cry was about killing demons, keeping our world safe from the monsters, heavy metal violence and a self aware irreverence of its own conceits. Dante is a great hero because he all but knows he's the coolest character in a video game. Eventually, with the third game in the series, it became more about his tortured relationship with his brother Vergil. 4 expanded on the mythology of Sparda's legacy by introducing not only another character into the mix but also a view into how the world sees Sparda's actions so many years after the fact. And finally, the fifth game is all about reconciling that twisted lineage, bringing all three of the principles to a kind of 'ultimate' form and riding the whole thing off into the sunset. It was never about politics. It was about ass kicking action, having a good time running up that style meter and, if you care, a family burying long brandished hatchets.
I don't know what I was expecting out of this series, but I would have liked for Capcom to step in and say 'Let's not repeat Ninja Theory's mistake. The audience wants to just have some fun and kill some unambiguously evil monsters.' But I didn't get what I would have liked with this series. Five years ago, I've have been a bit more upset. These days, I'm just mildly disappointed. Maybe they should have added some real life guest characters.
Lady is wonderfully performed but may be the most unlikeable 'stunning and brave' woman in the history of escapism. She drops enough F bombs to make up for the entire cast AND that of Castlevania, isn't fun or playful, has no sense of the reclaimed innocence that the video game version was able to achieve and is just an ornery, unlikable bitch. The backstory tries to get me to buy into her hard knocks attitude after a life that was taken from her by her father's obsession with demons but this ain't it, fam. Shankar dropped the ball on this character, plain and simple. It doesn't help that they made her part of a special forces unit called 'DarkCom', a black ops group tasked with hunting demons. In what is a clear nod to Captain Commando, their uniforms look very similar to his and one of the bit characters in a later episode bears a striking resemblance to him. Lucia from Devil May Cry 2 makes a cameo in one of the early episodes as well, and she looks great. Perfectly recreated from a visual standpoint. It's just too bad that she isn't a bigger part of this story and that she came from a terrible game, because I think I liked her more than this version of Lady despite having no lines and doing nothing with her 5 seconds of screen time. It's okay, she was never going to be more than a 'member berry anyway.
Dante himself is another problem with this production. The two gripes I have with him are:
1.) He comes off like Nero from Devil May Cry 4 and 5 cosplaying Dante and not an authentic interpretation of the character at all. This makes SOME sense, since Jonny Yong Bosch voices him and JYB was Nero's voice in those games. Apparently, Capcom doesn't want to cast Reuben Langdon (the definitive Dante for all time IMO) because he's conservative and has some conservative views. Yoshinori Ono reportedly fired him from reprising his role as Ken in Street Fighter 6, only to then leave Capcom shortly afterwards, although that has to do more with his desire to radically change the game into a tag fighter than anything else. Given what this animated series ended up as, I'm glad Langdon isn't involved. No need to tarnish his legacy with this.
2.) Dante is written as though he might as well be Deadpool. Nigh unkillable with a hyperspeed healing factor and a propensity for awful jokes, 'Donte 2.0' has a few clever lines that fit well in this series but utterly lack the self aware coolness of the video game version, especially in the third, fourth and fifth entries in the game series. Dante is an adolescent male power wish fulfillment fantasy. Shankar seems to be 'above that', but that's probably because he's a tremendous faget that was bullied in high school. I don't know if that's true, but everything he creates comes off as whiny bitching from an emo kid that has no reason, as an adult, to be either whiny or a bitch.
The soundtrack is a disaster. When it's not regurgitating cheap knockoff covers of the game's vocal offerings, it's muddying its visuals with some of the poorest choices of 'alt rock' of the 90s and early 00s. There is a scene in one episode where Lady needs a car and she takes one from a douchebag in a speedy, expensive looking sports vehicle. I don't know cars, so we'll call it the SUX 5000. The song playing from the car stereo is, I kid you not, Butterfly from Crazy Town. Not that the song is bad, but the only reason it's in the scene is because durr hurr Lady is about to get a cool car and the song has the word 'lady' in it. There is also a scene where the US military is flexing and, no shit, they are playing Greenday's American Idiot as it happens. When soldiers are raiding an apartment complex, Guerilla Radio from RATM is blasting. Evanescence apparently contributed a new track called Afterlife but Shankar's age is clearly showing with some of his soundtrack choices. This is pretty standard edgyboi music from a bygone age. Dante himself, it could be argued, is similarly dated but if you were gonna modernize him in any resperctable way, this wasn't the path to take. In my opinion, these sequences felt like things Shankar had dreamed of making for two decades and finally got to live out his vanity project dream. May he never get the chance to adapt Berserk. I'm sure Casca would lose all of her sensuality, sensitivity, femininity and softness. All Shankar likely sees in her, and characters like her, is a 'badass bitch' that displays motherly sentiments too often for his liking, I'm sure. But I'm theorizing now, so I'll move on.
It gets 2 stars out of 5. It has some great technical merits and legit fun action sequences but it is ultimately crippled by Shankar's need to project his own narcissistic values and dated tastes onto something that he simultaneously tried to update while holding to his own aging style. He isn't a talented enough storyteller to pull that off, especially considering Devil May Cry didn't need it and, I'd guess, never would have asked for it if anyone at Capcom had the balls to give that truth a voice. Dare I say it, but Castlevania, for its many flaws, is a vastly more satisfying product than this.