In Review: Batman Assault On Arkham

Synopsis: Based on the hit video game series, Batman must find a bomb planted by the Joker while dealing with a mysterious team of villains called, The Suicide Squad.

Review: After having a particularly stressful week with the website rebuild for scifipulse.net and various other factors. I decided to treat myself to a film via the Playstation Network’s VOD service and the new ‘Batman: Assault On Arkham’ was available.

So I’m sold. Its Batman and its DC and its animated and the one thing that DC always seem to get more right than wrong is their animated films. Hell even their bad animated films are pretty damn good, but thankfully this is one of the good ones.

The first thing that sold me on this when viewing the trailer was the fact that it includes ‘The Suicide Squad’ or as Amanda Waller would call it, “Project X”.

I haven’t seen to many animated films that include The Suicide Squad. So it was kind of refreshing to see them used and used well in this story, which is basically a race against time for Batman and a simple assassination mission for the Suicide Squad.

The animation for ‘Assault On Arkham’ is really, really good.

The storyline is also a lot of fun because you have Batman going up against Suicide Squad and both are pursuing different mission objectives. Batman is trying to track down a dirty bomb, which the Joker has stashed somewhere in the asylum. Whereas the Suicide Squad have been tasked with assassinating the Riddler and retrieving some files, which he has on every single inmate in Arkham as well as all members past and present on Suicide Squad.

The joker also has a role to play in this story, but unfortunately he is voiced by Troy Baker and not by Mark Hamill, which is a massive shame given that we have Kevin Conroy doing the Batman. It would have been nice to have had the Arkham games cast back together again, but I guess Mark Hamill was probably doing stuff for the new ‘Star Wars’ film when they were making this.

A standout voice acting performance for me has to be Hynden Walchwho is really fantastic as Harley Quinn. In fact Harley Quinn has the best line in the whole film, “Ooh I love electro shock. It’s a Shiatsu Massage for the brain.”

It has to be said that this is the best Batman animated film to hit for awhile. It certainly pretty much wipes ‘Son Of Batman’ off the map as the best that DC has offered us this year in terms of animated films. But what made this extra special was having the Suicide Squad share the focus with the Batman.

It bodes well should DC and Warner ever decided to do a stand alone animated movie just using ‘Suicide Squad’. In fact I hope they do because it would make for a refreshing change.