Review of Black Lagoon

What with the whole crippling recession thing and the massive black stain currently tainting the south coast, it's easy to imagine corporations as heartless money grubbers oppressing the common man in order to maintain their all-night drug-fueled yacht parties. A young japanese businessman by the name of Rokuro Okajima finds out the hard truth of these rumors when he is slated for death by his company simply because he found out about their plot to sell nuclear weapons to foreign dictators planning to use them to incinerate wide-eyed orphens in the small, undefended nation of Lovey-Dovey-stan. Oh, wait, did I say that he found outabout their plan? What I meant to say was that they told him their plan so that they would have an excuse to kill him instead of rescuing him from a group of mercenaries.
In the face of this revalation, Rokuro, or "Rock" to his captors, decides that any life is better than no life and helps the mercenaries escape their pursuers by dreaming up a manuever so outrageously awesome it has to be seen to be believed. And thus begins the adventures of Rock and the Black Lagoon company.
The BL company is your standard gallery of rougues: Dutch, the charismatic, slightly insane leader; Benny, the nerdy, brainy guy who only does something useful about every five episodes; and Revy, the resident badass who is called upon to do everything that involves making things significantly less alive.
Together, they accept missions from various parties to deliver things from point A to point B on their torpedo boat, The Black Lagoon.
See, calling them mercenaries was a bit of a misnomer. They're more like delivery boys. Delivery boys in the sense that Paperboy was a delivery boy, where everything is constantly trying to kill you.
And as delivery boys, they are pitted against the very dregs of humanity: independent contractors, revolutionary guerillas, nazis, and, worst of all, maids. (Yeah, we know what you're hiding underneath those dresses.)
Luckily, they have the implacable Revy on their side to even things out, as she has the approximate net worth of 5,000 kilojoules of awesome behind her. See, Black Lagoon takes place in the same reality as every action movie in existence in that your ability to get hit by bullets is inversely proportional to how awesome you are. It's hard to notice in the earlier episodes with all of the flipping and shit, but five episodes in she isn't even trying anymore. She just calmly dispatches everyone in her path while enemy bullets clang helplessly against her concentrated cool.
Still, for the most part the gun fights are done well and are entertaining to watch.
The stories are pretty dark, as you may have guessed from the story summary, but what prevents this show from turning into just a group of amoral escapades is Rock himself. He is the ray of light that shows that reason can still prevail in the depths of the underworld. But he is also the glimmer of naivety that violence is not the answer. For in the world they live in, violence is the standard and diplomacy is the exception. Watching his and Revy's philosophies clash is both amusing and terrifying, for it threatens to unravel your perception of the world as you know it.
So if you're looking for a psuedo-realistic action show that threatens to eradicate your bubble of safety and logic, Black Lagoon may be just the show for you.
And seriously, corporations suck.