Not doing her justice
Gadot is the one super character in a film otherwise full of duds
With “Justice League,” DC Comics is trying to replicate the success of Marvel’s Avengers franchise, but there’s one big problem. These are not flashy personalities with special talents that happen to complement each other. These people are not, as Hillary Clinton might put it, “stronger together.” They might as well be working solo. Basically, Superman can do everything and needs no one else. And Batman can do nothing. And there’s a few in between who can do a little here and a little there. For example, they can bring Superman coffee. The one exception is Wonder Woman, whose powers are mighty and indeterminate, and whose face in closeup is enough to make a whole audience go completely still. In 2017, Gal Gadot has the most powerful face in movies.
For long stretches, these close-ups are the only thing to look forward to. The audience sits there waiting for Gadot, and in between must endure weak computer graphics (lots of red sparks everywhere), flying skeletons with teeth and a villain, Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds), who wasn’t born to be wild but born to look silly. Hinds, in his real incarnation, is a formidable presence, but the computer renders him ridiculous, with a weak mouth and comical-looking horns pointing down.
Still, he’s the toughest thing on Earth, because, guess what? Superman is dead. Dead and buried. How dead is he? He’s as dead as Spock was dead. There’s no deader than that, not in this kind of movie. You want to talk dead? Any more dead and he might miss a whole hour of screen time. He’s so dead he’s almost not breathing.
The absence of the Earth’s protector has left humanity vulnerable to attack, and so Bruce Wayne — played by Ben Affleck, who seems out to prove he can growl just like Christian Bale — sets out to put together a team. Think of him as Tony Stark, but with no joie de vivre and next to no power. Wonder Woman is interested. Aquaman (Jason Momoa) would rather go swimming. Flash (Ezra Miller) is desperate for camaraderie. And then there’s Cyborg (Ray Fisher), who is a cyborg.
In this crew, Batman is like a rich amateur who produces a movie and then insists on being in it, and no one can tell him no because he has the money. Or he’s like a player coach, long past his prime, who puts himself into the starting lineup. In the right hands, Batman is a great character, with lots of psychological nooks and crannies. Throwing him into the Justice League is a disservice to the character.
The worst action movies, and this is one of them, are all about stretching out the action. There’s no telling the story. There is only delaying the story. So there’s a threat. A group is put together, and there’s a fight. That’s all director Zack Snyder has to work with. The screenwriters (Snyder among them) are at a loss to come up with something else, some richer or deeper element, some interesting tangent, and so they just make everything about this very simple, dull story take forever.
Of course, if it were a pleasure getting there, it wouldn’t matter. The ride would matter, not the destination. But with the exception of Wonder Woman, these characters are duds, even Batman, who, in this iteration, is a self-important jerk whose one talent is the ability to take a punch. And the special effects are a disappointment. There’s one shot in which we see Jeremy Irons, as Alfred the butler, literally turn into a videogame figure before our eyes. He’s watching an aircraft take off, and as it does, a human figure becomes a cartoon. There’s a metaphor here that’s so obvious it’s not worth stating.
“The stench of your fear is making my soldiers hungry!” Steppenwolf warns at one point, and we have to wonder: Are they trying to provide us all with wisecracks? The stench of this movie is making audiences sick? The stench of this movie is making critics ravenous? Virtually, everything out of the villain’s mouth is funny, or at least every threat.
Still, there’s Gadot, who has a face that comes along once a generation, though, for her, perhaps, this is the wrong generation. She should have movies built around her personality and not just be the best and only human thing in a mechanistic mess. Still, if you find yourself sitting through “Justice League,” you’ll be glad she’s there.