Batman: Soul of the Dragon

DC's direct-to-video animated movies are a curious proposition. From a technical perspective these 80 minute features struggle to meet the admittedly high standards set by the pillars of the company's best television animation - specifically, Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited. For an action focused series, one designed to be sold on home video in supermarkets rather than appear on TV for free, these productions routinely present as impoverished, both in terms of money spent and time afforded. Viewers who expect these DTV efforts to consistently scale up the free-flowing combat delivered by Joaquim Dos Santos' pit fighting Grudge Match JLU episode - broadcast on US television in March 2006 - will, more often than not, find themselves disappointed. 

Despite an enjoyable 1970s martial arts film framing, Sam Liu's Batman: Soul of the Dragon doesn't buck this trend to any significant degree. Action staging is cramped and robotic, almost completely failing to take advantage of a story that explores Batman's mystical self-defence training in the company of a number of characters created by the late, great Dennis O'Neil. Although functionally exposition, the flashbacks to this The 36th Chamber of Shaolin influenced drilling contains a fight so far beyond anything else in the rest of the piece - including every aspect of the finale - that it inspires sensory whiplash. Charged with defeating a buzzcut bruiser with only one digit, Kelly Hu's Lady Shiva launches into an attack completely unconstrained by the limits of a physical camera. The overbearing mediums that neuter elsewhere are utterly abandoned; Soul of the Dragon becoming unglued and exciting. The film even takes on the perspective of an index finger, hooking into a mouth to expose vulnerable gums and teeth. It's an inventive, beautifully boarded, sequence that, all too briefly, caters specifically to animation's strengths.