Rokurou Okajima is your everyday office worker except he gets bullied at work. One day he gets kidnapped by a group of mercenaries who call themselves, "Black Lagoon". When his company shows little concern for him and marks him off as dead, he decides enough is enough. He proves his worth to the mercenaries and joins them as "Rock" to start a new live on the island of Roanapur where the wicked live.

This is an action show which mainly focus on the relationship between the blood lusting, hot-headed, merciless Revy who grew up rough and Rock from the more civilised world. They just don't get along.

For most of the show, the action is quite bland as it's mostly Revy being a one person army posing, firing off her guns while the enemies drop like flies and misses with their shots as with most action flicks. The motives to the missions they undertake mostly have little impact to make the episodes interesting too apart from one or two that spread out over multiple episodes. Action gets better then but... also quite silly at the same time. There are the odd times the tougher enemies that rival Revy fall back to your cliche silly Anime characters which is a shame even though the tension picks up a fair bit. That said, there's some twists to balance it back out and the show really picks up once it gets to the OVA that follows after the second season.

The show's got some strong characters, one of the rare shows where the female characters aren't getting screentime for fan service apart from the scanty get-ups.

Without spoiling too much, one mission deal with Nazis so you might want to avoid this if you're sensitive to them.

I kept watching just to see what the newly knit Black Lagoon would end up going through. You could say it's a slice-of-life action show but starring mercenaries. Life for the characters are portrayed as cruel and unforgiving as you'd expect from living on an island filled with the wicked where even church is no sanctuary.