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PERHAPS Wonder Woman didn’t save the universe after all.
In June it looked like Gal Gadot’s whip-smart solo adventure had put DC Comics’s troubled series, or “extended universe”, back on track.
This pacy but very clunky fifth instalment suggests big problems still lay ahead.
We begin a few months after the dreadful ending to 2016’s Batman v Superman. The world is in mourning for the Man Of Steel, who was supposedly killed off by a naff CGI monster.
Then it turns out there’s a new, more powerful, and even more shonkily-animated villain on the block. This is Steppenwolf – a horned, one-note demon who sounds like Ciarán Hinds and looks like he’s stepped out of a 10-year-old video game.
For a half-explained reason, he and his army of flying insect men want to bring on the apocalypse by reuniting three half-explained mystical boxes.
As Superman (Henry Cavill) is definitely dead (did anyone buy that?), a still depressed Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) needs to assemble a crack team for the climatic showdown.
Top of his list is Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, who we meet in a hugely promising early action scene set in the Old Bailey. With the charismatic Amazonian princess on board, they set about searching for hidden superheroes. They are the superfast Flash (Ezra Miller), half man/ half machine Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and Aquaman, a bare-chested seahunk played by Game of Thrones’ Jason Momoa.
The script is part credited to Avengers writer Joss Whedon, and I suspect he came up with Momoa and Affleck’s testy and wryly amusing exchanges.
“You dress like an actual bat?” Aquaman asks incredulously when Wayne explains his alterego. After Affleck’s humourless debut film, this a welcome change of tone. Justice League is action-packed and a lot more entertaining than Suicide Squad or Batman v Superman.
But it’s also very unadventurous. The Flash’s slowed down action scenes have been done before, and far better, for the XMen’s Quicksilver, the airborne Cyborg plays like a grumpy Iron Man and Momoa’s trident-wielding man from Atlantis is just a hammer throw away from Hemsworth’s Thor.
When Superman Returns here, he starts to look faintly ridiculous. The Man Of Steel is another problem that needs to be dealt with. Killing him off was a terrible idea.
If characters can be magically resurrected in this universe, then what precisely is at stake?