DCEUlogy: "Justice League" Review

"Fueled by his restored faith in humanity and inspired by Superman's selfless act, Bruce Wayne enlists the help of his newfound ally, Diana Prince to face an even greater enemy."

Directed by: Zack Synder
Written by:  Chris Terrio

                      Joss Whedon 

Starring: Ben Affleck

                 Henry Cavill

                  Gal Gadot 

                  Jason Momoa

                  Ezra Miller

                  Ray Fisher

I've been a DC Comics fan for about as long as I can remember. Some of my favorite toys growing up were Plastic Man, Huntress and Black Lightning. The first comic I remember picking up was a Green Lantern starring Kyle Rayner. I'm about as entrenched in DC as you can get. That's why it constantly pains me to see DC struggle with having success in building a film universe. Aside from Wonder Woman, the results have been either mixed to putrid with the mean skewing pretty hard to the latter. After 2016 and the horrific one, two punch of Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, I was determined to finally let this film franchise go. I was going to give their next film a shot and if it wasn't good, I was out. Well we all know how that one went. After spending weeks, then months, near the top of the box office and scoring rave reviews from audiences and critics alike, Wonder Woman gave me the shot in the arm I needed to believe again. I wish I hadn't. 

Justice League is easily the worst effort in the DCEU (or whatever they're calling it) to date. Did I hate it as much as Suicide Squad? Not really. Is it as jumbled as BvS? Nope. Why is it the worst then? Because with the talent involved, there's absolutely no excuse for this film to be so lazy, uninspired, ugly and incompetent. From top to bottom, there's a treasure trove of talent on this film. Zack Snyder is a gifted visual filmmaker. His style isn't one that I'm particularly fond of but he can still create striking imagery like few can. Joss Whedon perfected the art of quippy, quotable dialogue and proved that you could combine multiple franchises into one, cohesive film. The cast is full of good to great actors. The effects are being handled by WETA, the same company that gloriously brought the Lord of the Rings trilogy to to life. Danny Elfman, film score legend, is on the music. How in the hell could this be so bad? 

For starters, this film doesn't know what it wants to be. Featuring Snyder and Whedon at their absolute worst, this is one of the ugliest superhero films I've seen in years and maybe 10% of the one-liners land. Neither succeed in what they're good at and it plays as a Zack Snyder movie as covered by Joss Whedon. Snyder's heavily impressionistic style is pumped up to eleven with the worst of this being the final battle cloaked in an oppressive red. Whedon's dialogue is shoe-horned in every chance he gets and so many scenes end on a flat, poorly delivered joke. 

Major blame needs to be placed on Warner Brothers. After Man of Steel, where many people were turned off by the excessive violence on display, WB went into damage control mode and inserted Batman into what by all accounts was meant to be a sequel to MoS. BvS was meant to be a philosophical look at what being a hero actually means as a response to Superman's reckless violence in the previous film. What resulted was a morose, brooding and bloated mess that sparked little joy and almost zero thoughtful dialogue about the themes it was presenting. Again going into panic mode, WB scheduled heavy reshoots for Suicide Squad hoping to inject humor into it after the negative reception to BvS. Another panic attack, another failure as SS feels like 10 different movies and is chopped to high hell. So you're starting to get the idea that each film is a reaction to the reception of previous film, right? Well that's exactly what Justice League is. It's a reaction to the negativity surrounding 3 out 4 of the previous films coupled with the positivity around Wonder Woman. What you get is a film that tries to shoehorn so much into so little and none of it works. 

There's not much a story to talk about here at all. Batman feels bad for Superman's death and forms a team of heroes that we know nothing about. A CGI villain shows up and wants to collect trinkets to destroy the world. They fight. The end. It's laughably simple. It's a cookie cutter of Marvel's cookie cutter formula and at times, feels like a parody. Where Marvel is in their experimentation phase with legit auteurs like James Gunn, Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi doing their own thing, DC is trying to play catch up. So their team film feels like someone took the first word of each sentence in The Avengers script, cobbled it together and said "BOOYAH!" 

Not a single character, save for Wonder Woman, works. Batman is jarringly different from the last film and we're meant to believe that's all because he feels sorry about Superman. He's gone from a brooding, hulking sad sack to a jokey, jovial buffoon. If Affleck had any conviction in the role, this might work but you can see the guy phoning it in from his trailer. Affleck wants out in the worst way and barely any of his jokes land because he delivers them with the dryness of sandpaper. The other three characters have the misfortune of being introduced in one film and they all suffer. Aquaman is played admirably by Jason Momoa but with each scene doing its best to try to convince you that he's a badass and not the butt of 50 plus years of jokes, his performance is cut down to growling one liners like "YEAH!" and "AWRIGHT!" The Flash, again played by a very game Ezra Miller, is hampered by horrible one liners and a caricature of a character. He's like if Sheldon Cooper and the MCU's Peter Parker fused and became a monstrous mass of manic energy. Spouting off Whedon-y diatribes about brunch and lacking social awareness, he's meant to steal the film but all he does is grate on you. Ray Fisher's man-machine Cyborg is the only character that feels like he has something to him out of the main five. Again, Wonder Woman works but she's given very little to do. Gal Gadot is a legitimate superstar and she shines every time she's onscreen. That's got nothing to do with how she's written and everything to do with Gadot's screen presence. Cyborg has an interesting arc and is played with a nice subtlety from Fisher. It almost makes you wish they'd have saved his struggle for his own film because it's the most interesting part of the film and has to take a backseat to twenty other things going on.

Superman is in this thing too and for the brief moments he's there, Cavill shines as usual. Henry Cavill could make for a legendary Superman if the film just let him do what he's good at. Instead it asks him to stare longingly at things and wonder what this human business all means. There's a scene at the start of the film where two little boys are interviewing Superman on their cell phone. Cavill exudes a charming strength and humility that makes for the best scene in the film. It's too bad the whole film wasn't more like that. How he's brought back to life is both the dumbest thing I've seen on film in awhile and has nothing to do with the last film even though that film ended with his coffin shaking. 

The biggest problem with this is how lazy it is. It's clearly an attempt to course correct this franchise into something workable in the future. If it wasn't shot twice and budgeted at around 300 million dollars, I might give it some slack. However, with all those resources, this is inexcusable. I know many people are happy enough with seeing these heroes onscreen and getting to do "cool" and "fun" things but after ten years of Marvel writing and rewriting the book, this simply isn't good enough. The only thing JL accomplishes is the faintest of hope for the future. But if this studio has taught me anything, it's not to trust them. JL feels mirco-managed to death, with every scene curated and tinkered with to the point of no return. All that tinkering and not one person thought to add stakes? 

That's right, this film has absolutely zero weight to it because its villain is a CGI creation played by a very bored Cirian Hinds. Steppenwolf is a giant monster man (A New God for all you comic fans) who wants to collect three Mother Boxes scattered around the Earth so he can take it over. The problem is, you know he's going to lose. Now, that's not to say that Marvel ever gives the impression that they're villains will win. The difference here is that Steppenwolf is given absolutely no characterization. Think Malekith from Thor: The Dark World but somehow worse. He shows up, exclaims what he's going to do and then does it. Until he doesn't. He's given nothing for us to ground ourselves in, no real motivation as to why he wants to do this. He just does. You can't invest in anything when the film doesn't care enough to.  

Is Justice League the worst film I've ever seen? Not at all. There are some "fun" moments to be had. I'm just sick of waiting to be wowed. I grew up wanting these characters to appear on screen. I want them to be as beloved as the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. That just doesn't seem likely with the current status quo. There's too much focus on trying to appease everyone. In the end that leaves us with a film that has no identity of its own with nothing at all to say. Until Warner Brothers stops being too ashamed of their last film to focus on making the current one it's own thing, these aren't going to be good. When they lay off the studio interference, you get a film like Wonder Woman where, by all accounts, Patty Jenkins got to do what she wanted. Let's hope they do more of that in future. As it stands though? Justice League isn't interesting enough to be a curio, isn't bad enough to inspire hate and isn't fun enough to make me hopeful. It's a nothing film that won't exist in 6 months time.

VERDICT

A bloated, ugly mess, Justice League fails in almost every conceivable way. A 300 Million Dollar Frankenstein of a film, it lists aimlessly desperately trying to get you to like its inhabitants. Wasting every resource it had available to it, Justice League is a whimpering crescendo in a franchise that continues to make every wrong choice. Give Wonder Woman or give me nothing.

2.5/10