In this Aztec Empire-alternate universe Batman story, after the father of Yohualli Coatl (the Batman for this story) is murdered by a bunch of Spanish explorers, he escapes to warn his king of the danger that is to come. The king rejects him, however, and so he goes off to train and become an elite warrior, guided by the bat god Tzinacan, as well as his mentor, in order to avenge his father’s death and prevent the Spanish from further destruction and chaos. Batman isn’t the only version of a titular character in this movie’s Batman-universe, however, as Batman encounters more well-known characters across the story.

I didn’t go into Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires with all that high expectations, but I was still interested to watch it because of its concept of being an entirely different take on the character, and the fact that I’ve liked the vast majority of DC’s animated movies, including the straight-to-video ones. The first positive I have for this film is that, despite it having a pretty obviously low budget, the animation is still actually pretty good. It has some really good lighting and visuals, with a lot of nice-looking “glowing” effects, so to speak.

The way the action looks and is portrayed is also really good. There surprisingly isn’t a ton of action here, at least maybe not as much as I would have liked, but the action we do get is still pretty good. It’s visceral, and you feel every hit; however, I did think it was kind of weird that it was a little hesitant at times with its violence. Don’t get me wrong, it can be pretty violent at times (you’ll see at the end of this review that I gave it a high caution rating on the violence and gore), but it’s fairly restrained for being an R-rated movie, one that barely qualifies as being R, even, at least in my opinion.

The third act final battle was definitely the most entertaining part of the movie. It’s grand, epic, and I thought that a lot of things came together pretty well. This is where you see a lot of the more traditional “Batman” stuff with all of his gear and things, and definitely the part of the movie where this version of Batman most resembles a version of the character we know and love. What I most liked about it, however, was that it made itself unique by using the technology of its time in a pretty cool way.

Unfortunately, though, Aztec Batman is built on a pretty bad foundation from the start. It tries to tell a pretty grand and epic story over the course of ninety minutes, and man, does it show. Most of the DC animated movies that are even shorter than this one try to do the same thing, but they succeed, and here is why: they are designed to be short stories. This Batman movie, on the other hand, was clearly not, most obviously because of how much of a rush it was to get to each plot point. It’s very jarring because sometimes you’ll have one scene that seems like it’s going to go on for a bit longer, only for it to jump ahead to the next scene that’s in a completely different location and time. They were, in fact, so jarring that I thought a lot of them were just flashbacks at first.

Another main negative was, weirdly enough, Batman. The surprisingly mild negative I have with him here is his character development. Just like the rest of the movie, it’s rushed. This version of the character, again, named Yohualli Coatl, gets like maybe one or two short training sequences, and boom, he’s Batman. The bigger negative is that he also barely resembles the character in the first place, at least when he’s not dressed up, and to put it in very simple (and maybe overly-simple) terms, he’s just not “cool enough” to be Batman. He’s young, which is obviously fine, but still has this somewhat immature quality to him that made it quite hard to believe he was actually Batman by the time he took on the mantle.

Finally, I was not a big fan of the ending at all, either. It was going in a positive direction in the third act, but the way it ended simply didn’t satisfy because it doesn’t really come to a resolution, and instead, goes for sequel bait. What made it worse is that it’s a sequel bait for a movie that I didn’t even like in the first place.

Even though I went in with moderate expectations, I was still disappointed. What could have been a cool, alternate take on one of my favorite characters ended up being a rather generic and cheap, not just in look, but feeling movie.