Devil May Cry (Netflix)

Adi Shankar returns to the video game adaptation arena after the success of Castlevania, this time bringing hard-rocking demon killer Dante to the small screen.

It's a sharp looking affair that feels more Invincible than anime. It's about as accurate to the original material as Captain N: The Games Master, but even so, it has its charm. Villainous mastermind the White Rabbit is a very cool character, all of my favourite scenes featured this demon in some form or other, the nonchalant and smug attitude to death and destruction made him a genuine delight.

Another new addition to the series is DarkCom, an anti-demon task force that wear outfits that may or may not reference another Capcom property, Captain Commando. From this team we meet Mary Ann Arkham, who appears to be loosely based on the game series' Lady, who made her debut in DMC 3. Here, she's a foul-mouthed demon-hating human that wears very thick plot armour, able to survive fights where her team-mates fall in seconds, she's hard to like given her hostility toward Dante and approach to scenarios that abandon logic in favour of just kicking down doors and shooting things. She's presented as the most competent member of her unit despite behaving like a thug. It's jarring.

Dante himself is a little too California skate dude, all corny quips and cheesy lines. This on its own wouldn't be quite so bad were he not a guest character in Lady's series, an issue that seems to absolutely plague modern storytelling. I don't know why modern writers seem so unable to make a story about the central character without injecting a ton of unnecessary "original" material into a show while sidelining the main attraction, but DarkCom isn't as interesting as the writers imagine, being pretty rote for the most part. Once the main team is taken down, the rest of the outfit seem to be thick and easily disposed of. A scene involving demon refugees made very little sense, the DarkCom soldiers seemingly only able to follow the orders of whoever spoke last on the radio.

It's not all bad though, flashes of creative flair do peep through - episode 6 in particular is an absolute triumph of animation. You know the series has shifted gears when the intro uses shadow puppet imagery which is genuinely beautiful. It centres around two viewpoints, that of Mary and The White Rabbit as they both discover the demon world in very different ways.

The scenes of Lady as a child, watching her obsessive father through the keyhole were stirring and often beautiful, the greyscale flashbacks providing much needed context for the character development. Her delight when playing as a child, mixed with the fear and lack of understanding that comes seeing her family fall apart through young eyes is beautifully directed. This is contrasted by a young boy visiting the demon world, where the animation style changes completely, a more stylistic and simplified vision of hell that's strangely charming, until the inevitable tragedy strikes, making it both incredibly moving (how can a child's funeral be anything else) and ultimately very depressing. It is pivotal in setting up the reasons for the conflict and opposing viewpoints of Lady and White Rabbit, but again Dante is completely disconnected from any of it and doesn't so much as make an appearance. It's quite telling that the best episode in the run doesn't need him.

The soundtrack is also something of a triumph - it was nice to see Papa Roach's "Last Resort" make an appearance, "Afterlife" by Evanescence, is haunting as always, "Gunship" by Ghost (a band I've only recently discovered) and "Guerrilla Radio" from Rage Against the Machine all give the series a gravitas it probably doesn't deserve. True, most of them have been messed with by "power Glove" into lesser versions, but they're all solid choices nevertheless.

The creatives obviously have great affection for the source material, they just couldn't quite grasp the texture of it - the bright Saturday-morning cartoon colours detract from the dark overtones of Devil May Cry, where the games balanced the gothic tone with a devil-may-care attitude to great success. The series? Not so much. 

Overall I found it ironically too dark for my personal tastes - I don't like seeing children and refugees being murdered, demonic or otherwise. Dante's quippy dialogue subsequently feels distasteful, Lady's foul-mouthed "kill-em-all" attitude might be attributed to childhood trauma, but it comes across as both immature and maniacal given the facts she's dealing with. Likewise her team of murderous thugs are hard to have any sympathy for, leaving only The White Rabbit as the one character you might actually side with in a series that casts him as the villain. 

In all, the series as it's fair share of action sequences that are well directed and set to great beats, but it feels a bit hollow, morally ambiguous and somewhat divorced from the series it's pulling from.