Lazarus

Episode 11

So, let me get this straight: The obscenely powerful assassin who merced an entire squad of armed soldiers with nothing but a kunai attached to a razor-write has been hired to kill Axel, a guy who has demonstrated an incredible amount of skill in parkour and hand-to-hand combat, but is still just a single, unarmored human. This assassin decides, then, that the best method of approach will be to use a single clip of pistol ammo on the seemingly indestructible windshield of Axel's car before abandoning ballistics entirely to lob grenades at the guy in the middle of heavy traffic? Right. Sure. We've got “Literally the Best Hitman on the Face of the Earth” over here, and it takes an entire episode of crazy hand-to-hand shenanigans and idiotic grenade softball pitches to land more than one hit on the guy whose only personality trait, aside from his consistent air of vague aloofness, is that he likes to escape from prison.

Now, before anyone tries to slide into the comments to explain to me the “reasons” for Axel's superhuman abilities, I must promise you that I do get it. Yes, plenty of action-adventure stories have hinged on having nigh-invulnerable protagonists who survive injuries that would obliterate any random mook. Yes, the silly, necklace-induced flashback to Hitman Guy's traumatic past implies that Axel must also have a background that is a little more nefarious and complex than simply being arrested an improbable number of times. Yes, the animation for the hand-to-hand combat is incredibly fluid, and the choreography is generally pretty good, which makes most of this episode at least easy to watch.

Here is my counter to all of those defenses for “Runnin' With the Devil's” extended one-on-one battle: Axel Gilberto is not a character. We have spent nearly a dozen episodes following this guy around on the world's most conveniently inconvenient wild-goose chase, and I couldn't tell you a single meaningful thing about him. We don't know what motivates him, we don't know what conflicts he struggles with, and we don't know what any limits to his strength and abilities are, since the only time Axel is allowed to lose is when the plot suddenly demands that he get stabbed in the gut by a giant spear. Sure, he's snarky, and we've seen him demonstrate a basic awareness of and care for the other members of Team Lazarus, but that doesn't make him an action hero. It doesn't even make him a functional protagonist.

Do you know why nobody asks questions when Indiana Jones somehow crosses the Atlantic on the back of an underwater submarine? Because he's a charismatic adventurer on a mission to kill some Nazis, and we're cheering for him with every punch and whip-crack. The same reason explains why few people are going to scoff at John Wick surviving several fatal gunshot wounds, a fall off a hotel roof, and an insanely long tumble down a hilariously tall set of stairs. We saw his puppy get killed, dammit, and Keanu Reeves sells Wick's gritty determination so well that the audience isn't about to jump ship for such petty reasons as “logic” and “basic laws of physics.”

This Axel guy, though? I couldn't pick him out of a lineup of the latest batch of Calvin Klein models, and that is what is killing Lazarus more than even its silliest of script blunders. There's a moment where Axel somehow catches Hitman Guy's razor-sharp kunai with his bare hands that had me throwing up my hands with disbelief, and I can promise you that I wouldn't have been able to care less if I gave a damn about Axel in the first place. Later, Hitman Guy just straight up teleports from the top of a moving train to the inside of a tiny boat several hundred feet away, and that's the sort of inane laziness that I could forgive if Hitman Guy weren't so irritatingly boring. When Chris runs up and misses every single shot she takes at the guy with her high-powered rifle despite being a trained Russian super-spy or whatever, I wouldn't be nearly so ready to nitpick if Lazarus just pretended to respect my intelligence as a viewer every now and then.

At least that poorly timed flashback had those cool paper-craft aesthetics going for it, and the fight scene did look pretty. However, it's just so disappointing. This anime seems like it wants to be another bona fide Shinichirō Watanabe action classic, and yet I am convinced that every aspect of this production that isn't directly related to animating cool fight scenes was unceremoniously tossed off to some cramped back office filled with overworked and underpaid interns.

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Lazarus is currently streaming on Max and Hulu on Sundays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.