JUSTICE LEAGUE (M, 120 MINS) DIRECTED BY ZACK SNYDER
The bosses have asked me for around 650 words on Justice League.
So I’m sitting here – here being a warm and noisy cafe in Wellington’s Cuba Street – staring at my laptop and wondering whether ‘‘meh’’ counts as a word. And if it does, could I just type out ‘‘meh’’ 650 times and still send them an invoice?
Probably not.
So, here goes. Justice League opens with a superficially attractive, but utterly redundant cover of the Leonard Cohen track Everybody Knows. See what I did there? I’ve introduced a simile. It’s one of those pretentious little devices that us reviewers like to wave around to show how clever we are. So now I can point out that ‘‘superficially attractive but utterly redundant’’ is a pretty good description of the entire film. Cool eh? And already we’re up to 200 words.
So let’s call that the first-act of this review. The second-act is usually where we explain a bit of the plot. Not so much that the readers will be writing furiously in the comments section about how I’ve spoiled the film for them. But just enough so that you have some idea of whether you’re interested in the story or not.
But with superhero movies, I figure that’s mostly pointless. Unless you’ve been living in a deep hole beneath the ice-caps, or have recently emerged from a life-long coma, or are about six years old (in which case, Hi), you already know what happens in Justice League. You know because you’ve seen the trailer. And because the same bloody thing always happens in the second-leg of any franchise about people with silly names who dress up in spandex and save the world.
They get together, there’s a bit of alpha-male jostling and whinging, then some super-baddie turns up and everybody swings their super handbags around until the baddie buggers off or karks it. The end. Have you seen the original Ghostbusters? That’s Justice League. Substitute some vaguely demonic giant with a horned helmet and growly voice for the Staypuft Marshmallow Man and Justice League is pretty much the same film. Just longer and less fun. And, boom. We’re up to 400 words. It’s time to ride this pony home.
This is the third-part of the review. It’s where we try to give some balance, and maybe chuck a few bones to the people who really want to see Justice League anyway. And so they should. Because film reviewers (as someone in the Stuff comments once said) ‘‘don’t like anything except black-and-whitedramas about repressed Iranian