She’s back and she’s a knockout in a new film
Wonder Woman 12A cert, 141 min
Dir Patty Jenkins Starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Lucy Davis, Ewen Bremner, Saïd Taghmaoui, Danny Huston, Elena Anaya, Robin Wright, Connie Nielsen, David Thewlis
The main thing many of us have been wondering about Wonder Woman is whether Warner Bros was actually planning to release it. For months you could have heard a pin drop on the publicity front. Perhaps the mere fact of it being a female-led superhero film gave it jitters. Perhaps it had something to do with the abuse meted out to the cast of last year’s allfemale Ghostbusters reboot.
Studios want hits, not causes, and Wonder Woman is a cause in waiting. Of the 55 comic-book films produced by Hollywood in the last decade, zero have been centred on a solo female character: that’s two fewer than have been centred on dogs. Girls in costumes can be one of the boys – one Avenger or X-man of many – but for an unchaperoned heroine you have to go back to 2005’s Elektra, and no one should have to do that.
Thankfully, now there’s no reason to. Hit or not, Wonder Woman is close to a knockout on its own ambitious terms. Patty Jenkins’s film officially belongs to the DC Extended Universe, the same sunless, woebegone realm that brought us Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad. But Jenkins – whose only other feature to date is the 2003 Charlize Theron showcase Monster – seems uninterested in cameos and cross-promotion, and devotes every ounce of energy to the story at hand.
It’s set far from franchise continuity concerns, in the thick of the First World War, during which demigoddess Diana (Gal Gadot) battles her way to the Western Front – where Ares, a horny-headed foe of old, is overdue another thwarting.
Mythic backstories can be an unholy trudge but Jenkins parcels up Diana’s in an elegant animated sequence that beguiles you into playing along. She also embraces the unmissably queer slant of the original comic. Diana’s island home is a strictly women-only utopia, and the opening act features all the regal horseback shots of Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen in leather cuirasses and bracers you (possibly) didn’t know you needed.
Then the blokes show up, like an entire Tour de France’s worth of bicycles for fish. First comes Chris Pine’s US spy Steve Trevor, with an urgent package for Allied high command, then the Imperial German flotilla, keen to ensure at all costs he won’t deliver it. For quickly glossed-over reasons, the ensuing skirmish spurs Diana to accompany Steve to what’s pointedly described by her mother Hippolyta (Nielsen) as “the world of men”. Masculine collective nouns in a blockbuster have rarely felt so poison-tipped. As for the golden whip itself – sorry, Lasso of Truth – its bondage overtones remain proudly intact, though the camera is generally more comfortable gawping at Pine than Gadot, whose pin-up status never edges out her standing as a hero to be reckoned with.
Released in UK cinemas on Thursday June 1