Review: JUSTICE LEAGUE

JUSTICE LEAGUE 
★★
(ACTION/FANTASY) 
Directed by Zack Znyder
Screenplay by Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon
Story by Zack Snyder and Chris Terrio
Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Henry Cavill, Ciaran Hinds, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Amy Adams, Connie Nielsen, J.K. Simmons, Robin Wright, Joe Morton, Amber Heard, Billy Crudup
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action.
121 minutes
Verdict: Whelp, it's not as bad as it probably would have been, but the first live-action theatrical appearance of DC's Justice League will likely go down in movie history as a weird accident occurring in slow motion.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN JUSTICE LEAGUE IF YOU LIKED:
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE  (2016)
MAN OF STEEL  (2013)
WONDER WOMAN  (2017)
MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS  (2012)

JUSTICE LEAGUE is significantly better than BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE, but it's still not particularly good, and what's more, the people who did like BVS: DOJ probably appreciated it for reasons that JUSTICE LEAGUE has now eschewed.  It's a rushed course-correction, something that seems a bit closer to what a DC cinematic universe could have more successfully attempted from the beginning, but at this point feels unearned and shoddy.  It's more an obligation than anything else.  It's a $300 million wet fart.  BVS was lambasted by critics, and while it certainly had its defenders, and it did technically make money at the box office, it performed well beneath what it should have brought in as the teaming up of a trio of our culture's most iconic and popular superheroes onscreen together for the first time.  The wheels were already in motion though, with filming beginning for JUSTICE LEAGUE only a couple of weeks after the release of BVS, with Warner Brothers scrambling to re-position the series on the fly.  Zack Snyder, who directed the not-great MAN OF STEEL and the horrid BVS, was directing JUSTICE LEAGUE for over a year before leaving to deal to a personal family tragedy, leaving Joss Whedon, the man who united Marvel's all-stars behind the camera in MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS and AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, to step up and direct JUSTICE LEAGUE through to completion, which included reportedly extensive re-writes and re-shoots.  In the end, Whedon is given a screenwriting credit, while Snyder maintains sole directorial credit, and the movie is just all kinds of weird.  Individual directors have made odd, uneven misfires before, but the behind-the-scenes drama does lend some explanation.  It was also mandated by the studio to have a two-hour run time, which I realize is probably to the chagrin of fanboys who want as much movie as possible for their dollars, but I've made no secret that I'm in favor of shorter movies.  Ideally, a two-hour run time would be the decision of the filmmaker, but really, most of these bloated two-hour-plus blockbuster run times come down to excessive exposition, overly convoluted plots and overextended action sequences, and the constraint of a limited run time I think genuinely helps most movies, including this one.  BVS was pretty bad all over, but enduring bad for two hours is easily preferable to enduring bad for two and a half, so while I acknowledge the artistic infringement of a run time mandate of two hours coming from Warner Brothers executives, I'm not complaining.

After beginning with a brief flashback scene introducing a more classically good-natured, decidedly revised Superman (Henry Cavill) from his super-douche portrayals in Snyder's MAN OF STEEL and BATMAN V SUPERMAN, the movie opens immediately following the events of BVS, with Superman dead and buried in a montage of society declining set to Sigrid's cover of "Everybody Knows", sort of bringing to mind a superior Snyder opening montage from WATCHMEN.  Then, the CGI aberration called Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) arrives from outer space, or something like that, to collect the "Mother Boxes," vaguely defined ancient sources of raw power which, when combined, are even more powerful, so Bruce Wayne, aka Batman (Ben Affleck), and Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), set to uniting a team of super friends to protect the planet.  In DC's rush to get to the team-up before the set-up, there are still a few characters that need introducing, having only previously appeared in weirdly lazy BVS cameos. There's Victor Stone, aka Cyborg (Ray Fisher, previously best known for stage work), a former college athlete whose father saved him from a nearly fatal car accident with the use of a Mother Box which regrettably also turned most of his body and part of his mind into advanced alien machinery.  There's Barry Allen, aka The Flash (Ezra Miller), a super-fast, socially awkward youth who's awestruck by the other heroes, and lastly, there's Arthur Curry, aka Aquaman (Jason Mamoa), the super strong, aquatically-powered prince of the undersea city of Atlantis.  They're still short one Superman, though.
The most obvious target of criticism, so obvious it really isn't fair, is Steppenwolf, a character that doesn't necessitate a CGI creation, but which has been rendered as such anyway and looks about 15 years late to the party.  His motivation is the cheapest stock motivation for any action movie villain; power, pure and simple; and there's really nothing else.  Hinds, a perfectly good character actor with the right material, gets one of the easiest paychecks outside of voicework doing a motion-capture performance with hardly any performance seeming to coming through the pixels.  Steppenwolf is an utterly lifeless creation.  He's not even accidentally interesting.

Within a perfectly ample two hours however, whether what the movie is doing tonally or thematically is particularly successful or not, it makes good use of its time with little waste.  While BVS took an extra half hour to do little worthwhile, JUSTICE LEAGUE sufficiently introduces three new heroes, a piece of crap villain, a lazy McGuffin, and while a lot of that is rote and could have been put to better use, it never feels rushed or languid.  As opposed to the oppressively moody, self-serious gloom and doom of BVS, the tone is a lot lighter and optimistic this time around, with a lot dull and desperate attempts at humor from The Flash, who's basically a less inspired version of Quicksilver from X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, although there are a couple of decent laughs scattered elsewhere.  Honestly, the funniest thing about the movie by far is the behind-the-scenes story of how Paramount Pictures wouldn't allow Henry Cavill to shave his luxurious MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 6 mustache for reshoots as Superman, so thousands of additional dollars had to be spent by Warner Brothers digitally removing the mustache with visual effects.  They must have been so busy with Cavill's upper lip that they didn't have time to give Steppenwolf any expressions.
In the end, the movie feels sort of pointless, but also harmless.  It's trying to make up for the godawfulness of BATMAN V SUPERMAN and SUICIDE SQUAD, but in rushing into the franchise building so early, before they knew what they'd done, the DC Extended Universe crippled itself.  There's a potentially much worse movie in JUSTICE LEAGUE, which is a weird reverse of the more common kind of movie that has good ideas but bad execution.  It's not that JUSTICE LEAGUE has good execution, but the execution is a lot better than the ideas.  The result is a movie that feels neutered, maybe for the better, but neutered nonetheless  It's the kind of movie that I think I wouldn't mind seeing more of, except, you know, good.

                                                                                                                                                         Images via Warner Brothers