When ‘meh’ is all you can muster
Have you seen the original Ghostbusters, asks Graeme Tuckett. That’s Justice League, except this is longer and less fun.
Justice League (M, 120 mins) Directed by Zack Snyder ★★1⁄2
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 St – 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 6 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-andwhite-dramas about repressed Iranian refugee ballet dancers’’ (I should really get a T-shirt printed of it).
So, yep. Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill are growing into their roles as Batman and Superman quite nicely. I’m starting to think Affleck is my favourite of all the movie Batmen so far.
He knows how to deliver a punchline. And there’s a wry and slightly self-loathing quality to his work that kinda suits the part.
Gal Gadot reprises Wonder Woman perfectly well. And the script, because of the thunderous success of her standalone film I guess, at least gives Gadot equal status with the dudes.
New kid Ezra Miller (We Need To Talk About Kevin) turns up as The Flash, and does enough to suggest that he deserved a film of his own. Burdened with being the teenage comic relief, Miller at least looks like he’s having fun and delivers most of the film’s scant laughs.
Diane Lane reprises her role as Superman’s mum and looks to be in an entirely different film. This is a compliment.
Listen, Justice League isn’t lousy. It is, maybe, exactly what you want it to be. A noisy, sometimes spectacular comic-book morality fable that does just about enough to set up a sequel and to flog the video game spin-offs.
By this franchise’s standards, that probably counts as ‘‘job done’’. I know the feeling.