The first of the new OVA's for the popular Black Lagoon series premiered at Anime Expo this year.  This was the original Japanese version with English subtitles.  Roberta's Blood Trail starts with a "quick and dirty" refresher of the events thus far in the story.

The story then flashes back to Vietnam in the late 1960's before jumping ahead to the mid-1990's.  The catalyst of Roberta's Blood Trail is the assassination by an American NSA team of a South American politician.  This incites the politician's blood-thirsty assassin, Roberta, to go on a killing spree for those responsible.

The politician's young son hires the Lagoon mercenary team of Rock, Revy, Benny, and Dutch to stop Roberta.  The OVA included a sequence where Rock and Revy go to a local watering hole to get information from a contact.  A young maid and protege of Roberta, Fabiola, visits the bar while Revy and Rock exchange information with local drug cartel members.

The cartel gangsters take Fabiola captive but not for long.  Fabiola commits one of the nastiest violent acts imaginable, and soon all hell breaks loose in an action packed shootout.  Meanwhile, Roberta starts tracking down the assassins who killed her master and dispatches them in brutal fashion, which could possibly cause an international incident and a world war.

The action sequences and violence in this show are fantastic.  The main characters are rather amoral and the story operates in a very grey area, but this one of the show's more appealing facets.  None of the characters are one-note or cookie cutter.  However, the notable female characters are insanely sadistic, violent, and aggressive -- almost to a stereotypical degree.

But in a way it's refreshing to see such ruthless, vengeful, and cunning female characters.  The women of Black Lagoon are not typical demure, blushing anime heroines.  While Black Lagoon is loads of fun, at times the exposition and talking scenes are rather clunky, confusing, and contrived.  This could be due to the English subtitle translation and my lack of understanding Japanese.

But by the end of the first OVA episode, when the Lagoon mercenaries are hired for a job, you have no idea what they were hired to do.  The scene is meant to be pivotal to  move the story along, but it came off poorly.  As with many Studio Madhouse shows, the animation production is a bit of a mixed bag.

The character designs, locations, and settings are very well done.  The action sequences look great and have an amazing sense of kinetic movement.  At other times, the production values and animation look a little sloppy with some cut corners, which is sometimes the case with Madhouse shows.  Still Black Lagoon 3 looks like it will be a must see if you enjoy hard boiled action stories.