To Hell With The Haters - Here's Why 'Justice League' Has DC On The Right Track

A week after Justice League’s release in cinemas, we’ve been subjected to a consistent stream of professional critics determined to gleefully tell us all what a crime against filmmaking DC’s long-awaited team-up flick is.

But, despite a general online critical consensus that hooking our genitals up to a car battery would be a more enjoyable way to spend two hours than watching this film, audience reaction across the board has been markedly more positive.

On Rotten Tomatoes, where the movie carries a 41% approval from the pros – resulting in an average rating of 5.3/10 across 274 reviews – 107,888 average moviegoers have collectively given it a mean score of 4.2/5 (or 8.4/10, to unify the scale), with 83 per cent of viewers enjoying the film. On IMDb, Justice League has scored 7.4/10. Metacritic’s boffins, meanwhile, have decided it’s worth a modest 46/100; the audience, however, has given it a comparatively kind 71.

I want to be crystal clear here, for those of you who bothered to move past the headline before sledging me on Facebook: Justice League is not close to being a perfect movie by any stretch. I’m not here to pretend otherwise, nor am I incapable of admitting its weaknesses. It’s chaotic and narratively quite messy, the reduced runtime makes things feel more rushed than they should be – which is kind of the DC Expanded Universe’s problem in general – and Henry Cavill’s de-moustached face is one of the saddest uses of CGI since The Mummy Returns turned The Rock into a flailing scorpion-man that looked less realistic than most video game bosses of the time.

Obvious flaws aside, however, Justice League is also a heap of fun, and nowhere near the irredeemable travesty that the critical response would lead you to believe it is. It is worlds better than both Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice and Suicide Squad – not exactly a high bar, I grant you – and, to be honest, more enjoyable than several entries in the expansive Marvel Cinematic Universe canon to boot.

It’s important to clarify that, despite how that assertion may come across, I’m not a blind DC apologist – if anything, I’m generally pretty hard on these films because I have a sincere love for their source material, and I honestly just want them to be the best they can be – but I’m also not going to sit idly by while people who have literally no idea what they’re talking about cast stones from their armchairs in-between marathon viewings of surrealist French films about why incest is good, actually.

So, it's not that the broad criticism of Justice League is entirely unjustifiable, but it's definitely excessively harsh. Frequently, it feels like several reviewers were simply determined to hate it before they even took their seat; it never stood a chance. Even The Music’s own resident film-festival junkie, Anthony Carew, and his deeply condescending review of this movie, for example, amply make the point that, sometimes, professional critics are the absolute worst people for the job when it comes to having an opinion about something.

Early in his review – basically the first thing he does – Carew decries the fact that Cyborg (Ray Fisher) deigns to utter a victorious “Boo-yah!” after saving the freaking world. To him, this is symptomatic of the many pitfalls of the Zack Snyder-led DC Extended Universe to date; that Cyborg would only say such a hackneyed thing “because Justice League is a film in the DC Synderverse, in which shit gets destroyed, the fate of the world hangs in the balance, and righteous bros rule the day”.

In reality, it’s nothing so cynical. I can see how he reached that conclusion, sure, but it’s honestly just an innocent wink to fans of the character. Cheesy or not, “Boo-yah” – as anyone with a passing familiarity would know – is Cyborg’s oft-repeated catchphrase, as spawned in the exceptionally joyous, wholly un-Snyderish Teen Titans cartoon, a multiverse away from the literally made-up reasons Carew takes pains to put behind its placement here. It's just a cute little treat for people who like Cyborg. That's all.

Many critics seem desperate to dislike everything possible in this movie. In plenty of other reviews, there has been a similarly negative reaction to Jason Momoa's Aquaman. In addition to misguidedly criticising his big-screen look as unbefitting of undersea royalty (never mind the fact this appearance heavily resembles his 1990s comic-book look), the sea-dwelling superhero has been widely sledged for basically being cast as an extreme snowboarder who happens to have powers.

Now, given that there's a point in the movie that Aquaman literally rides a Parademon like a character in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, I don’t necessarily disagree with that assessment. DC seems hellbent on making the character “cool”, turning him into a booze-chugging, devil-may-care Adonis when they could just have him control goddamn sharks with his mind and call it a day, so, yeah, I get it.

But, beyond that, the Atlantean king-to-be has far more going on beneath the surface, no pun intended, than the trailers or the torrent of unrelentingly bitchy reviews ever let on. In battle, sure, he’s all casual bravado, but he’s also shown to be a genuine hero, whether rescuing sailors in peril with zero thanks or serving as the stalwart guardian for a remote seaside village, for what one can only assume is pretty terrible pay. He's also shown to be vulnerable enough – albeit forcibly so, thanks to an accidental encounter with the lasso of truth known as the Perfect – to reveal an actual character beneath his façade of brash invulnerability.

In the wider team, both Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and Ezra Miller’s Flash, despite being unlike any Flash (much less Barry Allen) I’ve ever come across in all my days of reading comics – the closest I can pin him is the animated Wally West, in the still-excellent Justice League and Justice League United series – are consistent highlights of the piece. Watching them in action doesn’t make me wish I was simply watching their solo movies instead, as some suggest. It just makes me all the more excited for them.

Meanwhile, Ben Affleck, despite a lot of unearned criticism, continues to do a great job as a weary, borderline-suicidal Batman well past the point of adhering to his once-rigid disavowal of firearms, but being pulled back from the brink by finding new hope in the younger heroes he pulls together. And Cavill, even with his top lip residing squarely in the most unsettling neighbourhood in the entire uncanny valley, finally – finally – feels like a Superman worthy of that title.

So, we come to one of the most uniformly poorly received aspects of the film: its villain, Steppenwolf. Now, Steppenwolf is, admittedly, average at absolute best. Again, there’s some modicum of forgivable method to the seeming madness of using a D-list Jack Kirby character as the primary antagonist in DC’s biggest film to date – namely, to save a bigger and better bad, the universe-conquering Darkseid, for down the road – but it doesn’t quite make up for how otherwise unremarkable he is as a key threat against the newly assembled league of the DCEU's greatest heroes.

Somewhat befitting of Steppenwolf's subpar renown, the quality of the CGI used to bring the character to life has also been routinely raised as a low point, various critics having gone so far as to suggest it's one of the worst mo-cap renditions they've seen in modern cinema. Man, I didn’t think I’d be bringing up The Rock’s scorpion-man twice in one article, but here we are.

Even without the CGI problems, yes, Steppenwolf is a pretty generic bad guy, but compelling villains tend to be a pretty ubiquitous weak point across the entire comic-book film genre. Even in Marvel’s cinematic universe - the frequently championed victor of the big-screen battle between the Big Two publishers - the bad guys, with very few exceptions, are laughably uninspired. In Iron Man, Iron Man fights evil Iron Man. In Iron Man 2, he fights an army of evil Iron Men. In The Incredible Hulk, his main-event opponent is an evil Incredible Hulk. In Ant-Man, it’s evil Ant-Man; Doctor Strange, evil Doctor Strange; and Black Panther – as far as I can tell from the trailer – evil Black Panther. Having a bland villain is not a sin that Justice League alone has committed, and it doesn’t really deserve to be singled out for it, much less so exhaustively.

Speaking of villains, the most positive that many of the dismissive and down-the-nose takes tend to get is to compare Justice League, barely favourably, to Suicide Squad. But even this still tends to be couched in negativity. Where Suicide Squad was lambasted for (among other things) looking like it was coloured by an epileptic chimp let loose in a neon paint factory, Justice League - despite striking an evident middle ground between the hyper-colourful Suicide Squad and ultra-glum Batman V Superman - is still written off as too dark and sad and serious for their tastes. DC just cannot win.

This tunnel vision carries across to the film's tone, too. For some reason, there's a general refusal to acknowledge the frequent comedic moments peppered throughout Justice League, not all of which are necessarily successful but are certainly appreciated in the attempt. And even if those don't land for you, there's more to love besides: the mid-credits scene is straight from the comics, and a gleeful moment for fans; Danny Elfman’s score pays tribute to both his iconic Batman theme and John Williams’ similarly legendary Superman theme, and puts a wonderful orchestral spin on Wonder Woman’s usually guitar-driven herald; there's a raft of easter eggs - from The Spectre to the Old Gods, New Gods, New Genesis and beyond - that filled the comic nerd in me with joy; and it even evokes memories of watching Super Friends as a kid by highlighting the fact that, in these sorts of situations, Batman is actually kind of the most useless person in the League, which tickles me greatly, for reasons I can’t quite explain.

The point is, it's really hard to understand, at least from my perspective, where all this breathless vitriol, or at least indifference, is coming from. You shouldn’t feel bad for enjoying Justice League. It’s an enjoyable film. It’s big and noisy and shambolic and infused with the inherent ridiculousness of all tales about muscled superpeople beating the crap out of demons or aliens or demon aliens or whatever, but it’s such a giant leap in the right direction for DC that it kind of doesn’t, or shouldn’t, matter. In fact, really, the biggest gripe I have about the film is that – SPOILER – the Green Lantern who appears during Steppenwolf’s origin flashback doesn’t appear to be native to Sector 2814, and so has no real business being on Earth in the first place. (Of course, I could be wrong and, either way, why am I complaining? Green Lanterns!)

But now I’m nitpicking. The point is: don’t listen to people who would rather be watching a Werner Herzog documentary about how houseplants are an untarnished embodiment of the cold, uncaring face of nature (although, yes, I would definitely watch the hell out of that). Go see Justice League, have a good time, and to hell with the people who think they know better.

Boo-yah.