Movie Review: Justice League War

Well it's not incompetent. It's not good but it's not as bad as some superhero adaptations out there.  If I had one over all beef it's just that after the close of the first act it's a giant fight scene. There are some villains where that wouldn't be a bad thing but Darkseid ain't one of them. Part of the reason why you drag Darkseid out is because he can unironically give showy menacing speeches, while gloating about some plan that relied on the hero's ...heroics. He's a villain who has the stage presence and frankly the arrogance to pull all of it off in a way that seems natural. And he gets maybe 8 lines. They had Steve Blum. They could have made that work.

Furthermore because it's all one giant fight scene it all seems way too easy.  Dude has strategic beachheads to launch his invasion of earth. Gaining the intelligence to pull that off proves that he must have been planning for a while and the JL beats in a single night. I don't buy it.

Because it's a giant fight scene all of the leaguers end up feeling the same, though all of the personalities of the JL are on display albeit slightly tweaked . The worse offender of all of this is Batman whose "World's Greatest Detective" traits and role as the league's strategy expert get undermined by the punching. In my head Superman, Captain Marvel , and Wonder Woman are tanks, Batman and Cyborg are DPS, while Green Lantern is the white mage.   More specifically a batman fight at least within the context of the Justice league is about Batman tricking his opponent into thinking it's a straight fight so he can pull an awesome trick out of his hat at the last second proving why even though he has no powers he can hang with the best of them.

I bring this is up is that after a while the worst thing that can happen happens. The fights and by extension the movie itself becomes boring. It's 90 minutes of watching everybody punch stuff really hard. In short bursts that's kind of entertaining but after awhile I start screaming in my head, "Bored now I could use a good old Darkseid speech. Something about desolation, torment, and futility would do nicely right about now."

I'll be honest I don't really like some of the changes in personality, there are times when Wonder Woman, seems a petulant child (ice cream),  and the feud between Bats and the Green Lantern seems unprofessional for a space cop/Air Force pilot and the member of the league with largest stick up his butt.

But that's more of a New 52 argument and I'm not familiar enough with the comics to really touch that. Mostly I just feel that there wasn't enough story, especially when contrasted to season two of Young Justice which has a similar plot and characters but is much denser.



There everybody and I mean everybody is given something interesting to do.