“Dog Soldier” is an ultra-violent ‘80s OVA... without the ultra-violence. Sure, there’s fighting, and there’s a little blood here and there, but most of the 46-minute runtime is spent on dull conversations or flashbacking to scenes multiple times without rhyme or reason. The gist of the story is Hiba, the main character who used to be a Green Beret but quit and is now a construction worker in Japan, gets forcefully recruited by the government to stop a shady arms dealer from weaponizing the vaccine to the AIDS virus. He refuses, but once he finds out that his childhood friends are involved, he’s suddenly all in,along with his fellow soldier-turned-construction-worker friend, Fudou. Their involvement takes them to Tokyo Dome, and later to a remote tropical island. There’s a lot of shooting and explosions. Truth serum is used. A room full of gold bars is shown hidden behind a painting. The damsel looks more disinterested than distressed. This is that kind of anime.

The main issue with this OVA is that the main characters’ backstories are integral to the plot, but they are barely explored. There are flashbacks to their pasts, but in one case, the same flashback gets used several times without explaining what’s going on in the scene. Other flashbacks are similarly given little context. Naturally, character development also suffers from this lack of storytelling. By the time the OVA is over, we know very little about the characters, and thus it’s difficult to empathize with them.

There is a lot of dialogue, but no one’s really saying anything. The conversations just drag on and feel inorganic, and do only the bare minimum to drive the plot forward.

As for technical aspects, the direction isn’t good. The animation is subpar; sometimes characters would be drawn in a cartoonish style as an attempt at showing comedy, but the scenes weren’t funny at all. The character designs are okay, but they don’t leave an impression. The music (both the background music and the ending theme) is fair, but forgettable. The characters are voiced by a strong cast, but their talents are wasted here. Due to the stilted dialogue, it feels like they’re phoning it in most of the time.

Regarding objectionable content, there is some violence, blood and death, but no gore, and the violence depicted is surprisingly muted.

Overall, this anime is subpar on just about every level. If you want a “Rambo”-esque violent action thriller, there are better anime out there — most notably “Riki-Oh,” which is created by the same person.