Devil May Cry - Level 3 DVD Review

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The problem with the Devil May Cry anime series is that it doesn't really give us anything new. It has some cool action scenes, but so what if it does? The games have a bunch of those too, and you don't just sit and watch them there – you get to actually create those awesome-looking punch-ups and gunfights all by yourself.

This obviously backed the creators of the TV show into something of a corner. What could they give us that the games haven't given us already? Substantial character development? Meaningful social commentary? Deep and thought-provoking musings on the human condition and the meaning of life? None of that sort of thing fits very well in the Devil May Cry milieu. Dante is not a guy who likes to talk in long sentences.

So they did what they could, and ultimately it wasn't very much. Devil May Cry the cartoon has some cool action scenes, and the injection of a cute kid sidekick does lend itself to a few good laughs at Dante's expense. Otherwise it's action animation by the numbers.

The series limps home in this third volume. For starters, there's a one-off episode about a poker game, made up of roughly equal parts ancient gambling clich?s and equally ancient murder-mystery clich?s. (It also features one of the most heavy-handed musical interludes this side of Red Garden.) Then we settle down into a longer storyline that wraps up the overarching plot, as Dante faces off against one of his father's old foes, a demon named Sid. No relation to Sid Vicious or Sycho Sid or Sid 6.7. Just Sid.

They could have called him whatever they wanted, though, and it wouldn't have made a heck of a lot of difference. As has been the case since the beginning of the series, the rest of the story is just a way of marking time until the guns come out and Dante starts killing. It's obligatory, and it feels obligatory, like a joke with 20 minutes of meandering setup before you finally get to the punch line. It may be a hell of a punch line, but that doesn't matter when you're half asleep by the time it arrives.

Once again, the Devil May Cry anime has some great action moments – Studio Madhouse has been making this stuff look good for more than 20 years. They only last so long, though, and they're adrift in a sea of arbitrary plotting and perfunctory dialogue. It doesn't help that we've been trained to expect the same outcome from every confrontation, and the show doesn't do much to swerve us. What're they going to do, let Dante lose a fight?

A series like Black Lagoon makes a useful comparison here. The two shows aren't a million miles apart in terms of style, they both came out of the same production studio, but the one doesn't work and the other does. It has some depth of character to go along with the blood and gunfire, a plot where we can't guess the ending at the beginning, and a little bit of dialogue here and there to make the action mean something.

There has to be something beside the blood and gunfire. Devil May Cry doesn't have nearly enough of it.