Black Lagoon is the distillation of every Hollywood action flick ever made and then it is cranked up to the eleven, and at the same time is interspersed with philosophy, and contains numerous homages to other media (war films, Yakuza films) and contains amazingly surprisingly mature subjects such as terrorism and child abuse. And it has a cast like a Tarantino film, and unlike so much of modern anime, it actually has strong and competent female characters who don't break down all the time and need a male shoulder to cry on, and at the same time this anime contains over-the-top hilarious moments and at the same time features moments more mature than ten dozen Claymores and Narutos [with it constantly throwing at you info about the cold and harsh facts of life and shows the cruel reality of life behind the scenes in the underworld]...that and it is full of the single best gun-fights in the world of anime. As always, the awesome Madhouse Studios does not hold back on the budget and uses perfect and excellent use of music and lighting and backgrounds to make your blood boil and feel the action yourself. And not only that, but it is also a parody of itself at the same time hen all the above is happening. It makes fun of the action cliches that appear in action movies/anime series and thus provides a feeling of self-criticism that makes it a very honest series.

The characters are awesome in this series, besides their bada** ways and firing away bullets left and right, cursing, laughing maniacally in the face of the enemy, they also have a softer side and all of them get fleshed out in the course of the entire series. It is the perfect action series.
In order to make sure that the most amount of money is spent on this series, they divided the Black Lagoon anime into 3 seasons. The first season is the lightest of the three seasons, as it does not contain all of the mature themes that appear in the second season, and not contain the pure insanity of the [B]Black Lagoon: Roberta`s Blood Trail[/B] OVA. It is just the introduction to the world to come...
[Edit: There is also the Comedy Omake Series, but that is not connected with the main Black Lagoon and has rather dark jokes.]

One thing I must say is that if you ever want to watch this series, it is a sin to watch it subbed. You Must Watch It Dubbed, in English. In fact, the only show that I liked the dub more than the sub was Black Lagoon but that wasn't because of the "exceptional" english voice actors but because the dubbed version focused a lot more on funny swearing moments. However, if you watch it subbed, you have to listen to the rather bad Japanese attempts at speaking English. And ask yourself: Would a women from New York speak Japanese while gunning down Nazis? I am talking of Revy, the best anime action girl ever. She is the female version of Chuck Norris and she has an amazing personalty and a rather great background history and is shown to us in the anime and in the manga.

And now, I will do the Content Rating in each category:

Violence/Gore: In the course of the show, there is rather extreme violence.
But it never gets to guts coming out of bodies, instead: Think more of people getting gunned down and blood is spraying out of their bodies, also when they get stabbed the show shows the sword or axe in their body and the people who have it inside of them try to get it out...so if you are at all squeamish about blood, you might want to stay away.

Nudity/Sexual Content: In the First Season, there is some fan-service and several characters are implied to have shadowy sexual histories.

Profanity: In the course of the show, the F word gets said a total of 259 times, and this is only counting the two seasons. So an average of 11 F Words per episode in the two seasons. Everything else that is profanity gets said to.


Negative and theological themes: Every single adult character in this show smokes...a lot. Also, there is a Church of Violence that is a Roman Catholic Church that is apart of the Criminal Underworld.