JUSTICE LEAGUE: Minor League

Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: Chris Terrio, Joss Whedon, Zack Snyder
Cast: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Connie Nielsen, J.K. Simmons, Ciarán Hinds, Amber Heard
Runtime: 120 mins.
2017

PRODUCTION

Warner Bros. and DC have been trying to cobble together a Justice League film for a decade. The twists and turns of that saga are numerous yet not terribly worth enumerating. This particular intellectual property has been a potential cash cow that Warner Bros. has been trying unsuccessfully to exploit for quite a while now.

The production of the Justice League that is currently wallowing at your local cineplex, however, began in April 2016 (though the film had been in the works for at least two years before that). With significant reshoots taking place in May 2017, that makes Justice League one of the more prolonged film productions of all time. The reshoots were in large part a course correction imposed on the film due to near-universal revulsion of its predecessor, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Clocking in at $25 million, Justice League's reshoots were around four times as expensive as a typical blockbuster's reshoots would be. In fact, Justice League was one of the most expensive film ever made, coming in at an estimated $300 million, although we can't know for sure because Warner Bros. conspicuously refuses to release the numbers.

Although Zack Snyder directed the lion's share of the film, Joss Whedon was brought on in an uncredited directorial capacity after Snyder had to leave production due to a family tragedy. So what we have is one of the lengthiest and most expensive film shoots of all time, accosted by course corrections, and containing the watered down visions of two very different directors.

If there is one perfect anecdote that sums up the haphazard slapdashery of the Justice League production, it is that of Henry Cavill's mustache. The unanticipated and Superman-heavy reshoots of this May ended up coinciding with the shooting of another of Cavill's upcoming movies, Mission Impossible 6, in which his character will be sporting quite a fashionable mustache. The MI6 shoot required Cavill to keep his mustache, but he also needed to portray Superman, so Warner Bros.' solution was to erase his mustache with some quick and sloppy CGI, making this a likely candidate for Most Expensive Mustache of All Time.

PRODUCT

There are two good moments in Justice League. The first comes about halfway through the film. The team has just unceremoniously resurrected the dead body of Superman, undoing the climactic moment of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that I slept through. They accomplish this using a MacGuffin box, a magic pool, and the Flash's (Ezra Miller) superpowers, which in general are cool-looking but not compelling to watch.

Anyhow, Superman comes back to life and in classic Snyderian fashion begins to assault the other superheroes like an insane god. At one point during the rumble, the Flash engages his super speed, which is for us represented by everyone else freezing to a standstill. As he approaches a frozen Superman, trying to figure out how he can curb the violence... Superman's eye moves. This cues a slow motion-fast motion skirmish that ends up being the only worthwhile Flash fight. But the moment when Flash (and the audience) realizes that Superman is actually that fast is chilling and legitimately good. A pure comic book moment anchored with surprising intensity by Henry Cavill. The rest of the fight is garbage with a garbage resolution.

The other good moment of Justice League is the first moment of Justice League. In a brief piece of found footage, we see Superman talking to the authorities from behind police tape as two unseen children try to get his attention. They then ask a series of rapid fire questions that he responds to warmly and with a bit of measured perplexity ("Have you ever fought a hippo??"). The scene ends when one of the kids asks Superman what his favorite thing about Earth is, and he stares into the middle distance with the ghost of a smile.

Fitting that the two highlights of this lump of mediocrity center around Cavill's Superman despite the character being awkwardly crammed into the movie. DC's franchise has been relentlessly characterizing him as a dour, moody object of controversy, but the moment Cavill is allowed to portray a modicum of light-touch charisma, he pops. These slivers of humanity could be taken as a sign that the franchise is slowly righting itself, but I rather think that's an overly optimistic take on what is otherwise the dullest catastrophe you will ever see.

That's what the film is, make no mistake. Financially, creatively, pragmatically, it is a catastrophe. It doesn't even have the gall to be a fascinating, deranged catastrophe like its predecessor. Justice League is the carcass of an idea that has been diluted into oblivion. Each frame reeks of sweaty fumbling executives asking plaintively, "This is what you like, isn't it? This is just exactly like the sort of thing you like?" It is that exact mindset that makes Justice League so pedestrian. If you were to amalgamate all the complaints levied against superhero cinema in the past decade, it would look something like this movie.

I could sling insults at Justice League all day. I could point out that every scene is blocked like a high school play. I could lament about how much flatter Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman is here than in her title movie. I could dissect the bizarre tonal whiplashes issuing from two directors most unsuited for each other's material. I could sympathize with Amy Adams, J.K. Simmons, and Jeremy Irons, caught in thankless roles in a dead end franchise. I could marvel that Steppenwolf somehow manages to be the most boring, worthless villain in all of superhero cinema, even surpassing Malekith from 2013's Thor: The Dark World. Or that his CGI makes him look like a circa 2004 Playstation 2 villain. I could make fun of the fact that Aquaman's trident is actually a pentdent. I could note that at no point in this review have I bothered to mention Batman (Ben Affleck) even though he is ostensibly the protagonist of the movie. I could...

But I'll leave it at that, because frankly, it just isn't that fun to take a dump on Justice League. It's sad. Warner Bros. had a pantheon of some of the most iconic characters in modern pop culture, and all they could do about it was this. Here we are, staring into the void of the cinematic-financial bubble that is about to burst, thanks to creative bankruptcy and stifled innovation.

1 / 5  BLOBS