Franchise heroes nosedive
‘Justice League’ misses the plot with chaotic production and storyline glitches
(2) JUSTICE LEAGUE. Directed by: Zack Snyder. Starring Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Jeremy Irons, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Diane Lane, Connie Nielsen, JK Simmons and Ciarán Hinds (voice). Reviewed by Robbie Collin.
SUPERMAN (Henry Cavill) quips: “A man I knew used to say hope was like your car keys,” at the beginning of Justice League, into a cameraphone clutched by a couple of flustered schoolboy fans. “It’s easy to lose but if you dig around it’s usually close by.”
Yet there’s little trace of the stuff in Warner Bros’ latest attempt to jump-start their DC Comics blockbuster brand, which at this point looks less like a cinematic universe than a pop-cultural black hole sucking up money and audience goodwill.
After a four-film build-up that began four years ago with Man of Steel, Justice League should have felt like a culmination, with Batman and Wonder Woman recruiting new heroes and bringing back Superman in order to fend off an extraterrestrial invasion, in much the same way the Avengers did for Marvel five years ago.
Instead it feels like a sheepish feature-length retraction of the franchise to date. It’s consistently embarrassing to watch and features plot holes so yawningly vast they have a kind of Grand Canyon-like splendour.
Batman and his alter ego, Bruce Wayne, are once again played by Ben Affleck, but his earnest, striving, Just For Men-box version of the character here is all but unrecognisable from the machinegun-toting hungover gargoyle in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Then there’s Henry Cavill’s Superman, whose personality changes on a shot-by-shot basis, from blank-eyed demigod to lumbersexual funster faster than a speeding bullet.
Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) is perfectly recognisable from her solo film earlier this year.
Its fundamental lopsidedness might come down at least in part to its chaotic production.
The end result is a broken film that you can’t imagine any number of rewrites or reshoots could have saved. It can’t even decide how to start, and offers up no less than five introductory scenes, including Bruce Wayne pony-trekking in Iceland, Wonder Woman thwarting a terrorist attack in London, and yet another instance of that DC franchise staple, the slow-motion funeral.
One of the film’s three new superheroes, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman – picture Marvel’s Thor crossed with the disgraced Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte, holding a garden rake.
Ezra Miller’s early scenes as the lightning-fast Flash bode a little better – as he visits his father (Billy Crudup) in prison, there’s a glimmer of backstory – but then he’s immediately reduced to the team’s fantastically annoying comic relief.
As for Ray Fisher’s Cyborg, the film doesn’t seem to know anything about him: he has his hood up a lot, and that’s more or less all we get. Meanwhile, gurgling away in the background is Danny Elfman’s score, which grabs at John Williams’s 1978 Superman theme, Elfman’s own Batman motif from the Tim Burton years, and Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL’s Wonder Woman cello riff, in a panicky fumble for something, anything, the audience might recognise or like. The result is an incoherent din and a total mismatch for Snyder’s images.
At one mind-boggling juncture the team inexplicably leaves the final Mother Box unattended in a car park, only for Steppenwolf to beam down and make off with it.
For a scene that risible to end up in a $300-million (R428-million) blockbuster is no mean feat – but Justice League is a mess in ways cheaper productions could only dream about.