I have given up on Madlax, I suffered through four episodes and that is it; to quote Popeye, “Its all I canz takes, I can’t takes no more.”
Here are the highpoints, the animation is all over the map. Some good, much of it poor, a few scenes even exceptional. The writing is what sinks this, the writer has obviously never been in the service or even held a firearm much less been under fire or or even in a fight (or talked to anyone who has). The dialog is insipid and stupid; and the storytelling is incompetent. The voice acting only serves to exacerbate the horrible dialog. I did a lot of wincing and groaning during these episodes.
Episode One Rant:
Their first attempt to humanize Madlax is to have her musing before her jump into enemy territory over what she will eat for dinner, “Pasta, I think I will have pasta.” Really? This is the best you could do? Having her thinking about food? Not about her mission, or the people dying down below, or the suffering this stupid civil war is causing? She is thinking about food? I rolled my eyes.
Next she jumps from the helicopter and dives down and down, disappearing into the treeline. I am thinking, “Wow, this bitch is even stupider than I thought, she never deployed her chute. This will be a short episode.” 
And yet later we see her hanging from from her chute, snagged on a tree. WHAT?! We never saw her deploy it! This means one of three things- a) the animators are too frakking cheap to animate the chute opening. b) she is so stupid she forgot to open the chute until she hit the trees canopy. c) she is an adrenaline junkie and deliberately did not deploy until the last second and did not die in doing so because she is a cyborg or something. I was leaning toward a combination of all three.
A voice starts talking to her while hanging there. Where is this voice coming from? She is not holding a phone, or a walkie. Nor is she wearing a headset, is the voice in her head? After an abrupt deceleration which would kill a normal person it is no wonder she is hearing voices. Or maybe she has a chip in her head, this strengthens my cyborg hypothesis. No attempt is made to explain who the hell she is talking to.
After a lot of mediocre animation a memory is triggered and Madlax has a vision, this is the only GOOD animation in the entire episode it has some very nice effects in it so this tells me the sequence is likely going to be used over and over and over again during the series. Much like the watch sequence in NOIR.
The big action sequence finally arrives and our heroine with the annoying smirk starts capping trained soldiers with nothing but her handgun, and somehow (they are too cheap to show us how) she survives having a Humvee blown out from under by an armored car. She then blows up the armored car and for some unknown reason strikes a ridiculous pose in the middle of the road so the officer can vainly empty the entire magazine of his sidearm at her. Why? I dunno, because she is stupid and arrogant is my only guess. Her dialog certainly encourages this idea. But wait, it gets worse…
During this entire gun battle they make numerous quick little cuts to a Huey Cobra Gunship that is making its way to the area. Each time they make a point of showing us all of the impressive weaponry it is bristling with, OK OK we get it, it has rockets and a chain gun no need to keep hitting me over the head about it sheeesh! And yet after all of this build up, it never does anything except creep in close enough for her to shoot it down with one shot of a bullpup assault rifle. Oh, and of course she had to strike another silly pose first, oh and I forgot to mention the best part. Her eyes were closed. God forbid she should actually aim at the damned thing.:rolleyes:
Lame. Lame. Frakking Lame! Not only will small arms fire not take out a Cobra, but why would it even come in that close? If all contact with the friendly units in the area were to suddenly cease the pilot and gunner could safely assume that all assets in the vicinity were lost. And they would just sit back and saturate the area with 7in FFAR, goodbye Madlax next series please.
So at this point my theory was this: Madlax was a vacuous and stupid secretary who worked for a criminal organization and one day stepped out in front of a bus. They took her and made her into a battle cyborg infiltration unit, and they send her off on missions in order for her to pay back the debt of her surgery. It would explain the voice in her head, how she survive the chuteless drop, why she is unafraid of bullets and how she survived having Humvee blown out from underneath her. Why she always has a stupidly happy expression and never says anything intelligent.
Episode Two Rant:
Fell asleep and had to sit through it again. :eek: This Heather girl is even worse, wholly crap she makes Madlax seem like a MENSA candidate! She has no personality, she is not cute or naive or childlike… just stupid. I like her even less than the supposed mercenary, and who are these other people? The little girl in the desolated landscape, no explanation is even attempted. New characters are introduced but I am given no reason to care about any of them.
Episode Three:
SIGH
Episode Four:
It is like two only worse. And as if there weren’t too many characters already even more are introduced as well as another subplot. A subplot? We don’t even have a main plot yet… No one is developed, I hate every character except the frakking maid and now you are trying to introduce a subplot? Forget it.
Noir hooked me with episode one right away, I never cared much for Mireielle but Kirika more than made up for it. El Cazador was much the same, I fell hard for Nadie with that awesome scene at the café with the telephone. And Ellis was adorable! They missed the boat with this one though… at least for me. Others may enjoy this but I couldn’t stand it, my tastes obviously differ.
(sad panda)