"Black Butler" is a beloved manga that my daughter and friends liked very much. So when a movie version came out, they were all excited to go see it. I have not read the manga "Kuroshitsuji" yet, so I felt I needed to see the film first myself before she does to see if it is okay for her age group. The local film classification board had rated it R- 13, but they had not been entirely consistent the way they classify films per appropriate age.

The beginning narration sets the film in a near future time, when the world was divided into East and West. The West was headed by a Queen who sent her "watchdogs" to keep her enemies at check.

In such a world, a "Demon's Curse" killer is going around killing diplomats by some sort of gruesome instant mummification process. Alarmed, the Queen chooses an orphaned aristocrat, Earl Genpo Kiyoharu, as her "watchdog" to get to the bottom of this matter.

The young Earl has under his service a butler of many skills, Sebastian, who does whatever his young master wills him to. It turns out that Sebastian's talents are because of his demonic nature, for which the Earl will have to pay for with his soul.

I believe that this film deviates much from the book by making Kiyoharu to be actually a girl Shiori pretending to be a boy in order to secretly exact revenge on her parents' killers. This also made it possible for a love angle to develop between master and servant, which of course was not in the original manga. The original setting in the manga was Victorian England, but here we only get the Victorian-looking grand manor and colorful gardens of the Genpo family instead.

The opening sequence alone where Sebastian takes on an entire warehouse full of gangsters only with his butter knife sets the incredible whimsical tone for the whole film. There would be violent fight scenes, murder scenes, death scenes, as well as scenes of drug abuse, and the disturbing demonic subplot, which would automatically make this film rated R-16 in my book. In between these violent scenes though, the film's momentum dips a lot with long talky explanatory scenes.

The acting department is on the campy side. The lead actors playing Sebastian and Kiyoharu are both androgynous-looking which seems to be the current rage among the younger generation. There was even more campy acting from the actors playing the clumsy maid Lynn and Kiyoharu's guardian, his Auntie Hanae. All the one-dimensional villains they faced also come from the same school of exaggerated campy acting.

Overall, this is a confused film with a rather convoluted plot which did not have a clear direction that it wanted to take. If we were to only judge it with this film, it does make me wonder what those fans of the original manga loved in it. This film alone is occasionally entertaining anyway but it most probably could have been done or adapted much better than what came out now.

Please forget the opinions of manga fundamentalists. To quote the Black Butler, "their opinions slightly fuel my wish for killing". They are not alone on this world and these movies are made for more general public who do not have encyclopedic knowledge of the respective fictive universes. So their fundamentalist dismissals of movies based on this argument are totally off the mark.

I have seen the Black Butler movie for the very first time and I have kinda liked it. Of course, there is an incredibly complex storyline that makes the Japanese stories hard to follow for us, the plain West village folks. It might be a hard thing to swallow for some but it is worth it.

The story is actually a near future sci-fi fantasy crime movie. Even though this might seem to be bizarre, it is actually very cool. The plot is somewhat familiar for the Westerners as it builds on the West culture. The uneasy relationship between the "master" and "servant", that is somewhere between the love and the hate is also very interesting. The "master" might seem spoiled and much more powerful "servant" might seem cold and cynical, but the ending is really powerful.

Forget the critics. This is very "above average" drama, a crime movie and a somewhat bizarre love story. Pretty much unforgettable experience. And yes, the opening sequence is one of the most amazing combat scenes I have seen: If you meet a well dressed butler with a butter knife asking politely for something, you should not laugh at him. You should not!

I should point out at the outset of this review that I've never seen the anime or read the manga version of BLACK BUTLER; I only watch live action movies as a rule (although I make an exception for Studio Ghibli) so I came to this completely new. I suppose the film it most resembled for me was DEATH NOTE, another live action adaptation of a popular anime, but compared to DEATH NOTE, BLACK BUTLER is a huge disappointment.

I suppose this isn't a bad film per se; rather, it's simply not very good. It's a predictable tale about a young girl fighting crime with a demon butler at her side. There's a whole Faustian thing going on here (again), but the story line is so slow and mannered that I was twiddling my thumbs and waiting for something interesting to happen. In addition, I found the leading characters unremarkable and unlikeable, and the efforts to depict the butler as some kind of 'cool' guy fall flat; I thought he was a posturing ponce.

The plot takes a long time to get going and involves the usual stereotypes about betrayals and twists and an evil megamind planning to unleash a deadly virus on the public. The story is augmented with average CGI effects, neither particularly good nor particularly bad. There's a teen/young adult feel to the whole thing that made me feel like I was too old to be watching it at times. As for the action, it's slick and heavily stylised, incorporating way too much slow motion for my liking. BLACK BUTLER is certainly an inventive and fresh-looking film, but one I felt distinctly 'meh' about.