Justice League Proves That $300 Million Buys Awful

Important: There are heavy spoilers throughout this review. Don't say we didn't warn you…

JUSTICE LEAGUE

“Boo-yah!”

This is, seriously, what Ray Fisher’s Cyborg says at the end of Justice League, when the, um, Justice League has finally banded together, saving the world (spoilerz!!!) right as it’s about to be forever razed or blown up or turned to ash or something.

It’s important to note that Justice League isn’t set in the ’90s, like one of those X-Men movies making comic mileage out of the kitsch of previous eras. Nor is this line some kind of ironic commentary on the stupid things super-heroes say after saving the day, nor part of a running joke in which Cyborg says hopelessly dated slang-terms due to being programmed to talk like Stuart Scott a quarter-century ago. It’s 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.

To wit: meet Jason Momoa’s Aquaman, a whiskey-swillin’, wave-ridin’, tatted-up, roided-out gym-junkie from Atlantis. Way down below the ocean, where I want to be, he can command the power of the seas, but he mostly just likes to bring fishes to and save the asses of Icelandic villagers in return for booze. He may be descended from some Atlantean queen (emphasis on maybe: his backstory is glossed over pretty fast), but he is One Outrageous Dude!

If you think his pecs are grotesquely swole (u lift, bro?), then wait ’til you see Superman, back from the dead (spoilerz!!!), floating above Metropolis shirtless, showing fine chest-hair and a mighty set of man-cans. Given the last time out it was Batman V Superman (colon something something Justice), old Batfleck himself needs to keep up in this chesty contest, wearing a black batsuit in which he’s positively buxom. Toiling for a director who filmed the beefcake skinflick 300, everyone herein, even a senior citizen, has to be totally jacked; as jacked as the horrifying cock-rock cover of Come Together (by Gary Clark Jr. & Junkie XL) awaiting to assault your eardrums over the closing credits.

Justice League is, from go to post-credits-teaser-for-the-next-one woe, a horrible fever dream of committee-thinking, brand-managing, IP-bilking, toy-selling, Extended Universe filmmaking. It’s a nightmare for anyone who likes their cinema non-jacked, non-macho, non-facepalming. For anyone who prizes things like narrative coherence, sustained mood, singular mise-en-scène, a command of pacing. It is the collective labour of a thousand CGI technicians at a thousand computers, throwing pixels at a wall like so much visual shit. It cost US$300mil to make. It is awful.

The fifth feature in the (good lord) DC Extended Universe, Justice League is a getting-the-gang-together movie that doesn’t even do the getting-the-gang-together stuff well. First we meet Ben Affleck’s Batman, oh-so-manly gravelly-voice badly dubbed, terrorising some local stooge who just wants to tend to his pigeons while maybe trying to shoot people. Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman — a friendly face, now, after her standalone film — arrives standing atop the sword of Lady Justice herself, before laying waste to some randos who want to blow up a bank or something.

Ezra Miller’s Flash is visiting his falsely imprisoned pops (Billy Crudup!) in the clink and talking/running fast, and ol’ boo-yah Cyborg is holed up in his dad’s apartment, a Frankensteinian monster so emo he just sits in his bedroom in health-goth sweats, hood up. They’re the fresh young blood that’s going to prop up the greying Affleck, the world’s favourite murderous right-wing oligarch. Roping in Aquaman from the broceans, and bringing back Supez from the dead, well, there you have it: a rag-tag alliance of original-odd-sextet superheroes in mismatched outfits, coming together (that Beatles cover!) to save the world from... wait, seriously?

This film’s villain, some marauding alien-soldier in pointy goatee and pointier helmet called Steppenwolf (mo-capped by Ciarán Hinds), is possibly the worst CGI monster your old bean Film Carew has ever seen, and I watched all three Hobbit movies. He shows up, after “millennia” in exile, amidst the Amazon-women-in-the-mood from Wonder Woman’s softly lensed ladies-only isle, bursting out of something seriously called a Mother Box — woah, vaginal euphemisms in the house! — to start swinging his axe around, asking questions later. His ‘evil villain’ voice is so lame you feel like you’re watching a Transformers movie, and he uses it to instantly make prophecies about his imminent power and the end of the world and etc. He’s so villainous that he then hits up Atlantis — swimming like a fish in full armour and what look like solid metal boots — to steal their MacGuffin-esque Mother Box, taking out Momoa’s Aquabro in an underwater fistfight that’s not a patch on that one from Top Secret!

“Praise to the mother of horrors!” ol’ Wolfy cackles, at one point; at another: “Mother is coming!” I have no idea what he was talking about, because it’s never explained, but the maternal fixation is surely a symbol of that ultimate evil: a woman with an emasculated son! While on the subject of maternity: woe to thee oh Wonder Woman, whose role in this league of Extraordinary broze is that of long-suffering mother: she the alpha-male whisperer, the ego-soother, the peacemaker, keeping the gang together by sweet-talking the angry, ultra-competitive men. “Children,” she sighs, with an exasperated smile, “I work with children.” It’s not exactly the era of the old comics when she was, seriously, the JL secretary, but, after all the feminist buzz for Wonder Woman, it’s not a particularly progressive role.

Gadot is the one who steps up to weightily intone the mythological Steppenwolf backstory, which gives rise to illustrated memories. In this sequence, Justice League makes plain a comparison that haunts the entire film: Thor: Ragnarok. In the one-before-this blockbuster on the popcorn-movie calendar, a similar distant-backstory of forged villainy is depicted in glorious shades; director Taika Waititi evoking the soft oils and chiaroscuro effects of old paintings of Norse mythology. Here, the birth of the Justice League villain comes with cod-Lord Of The Rings figures and horrifying CGI. When Gadot says that he turns any planets he touches down on into a “primordial hellscape”, she’s really just describing the visual look of this film.

Yes, Justice League is, again, dark and brooding; full of slate-greys and big shadows and glowering men. When the End Times are nigh at the villain’s hideout (seriously: a nuclear power plant smoke-stack in Northern Russia!), black clouds roll in and the sky turns red, with bursts of lightning crackling as the Earth — or a pixelated digital-backlot version thereof — turns generic-primordial-hellscape. Compare this to the wild riot of colour and whimsy in Ragnarok, and to the ridiculous and psychedelic side-dishes Marvel has recently been pleasingly plating, and Justice League looks, somehow, even worse.

It’s not quite Suicide Squad bad, but it’s still bad. Even the things that work — Gadot is charming, Miller is funny — just make you wish you were watching them in their own films, not thrown together in this one. There’s no chance that the shitness of Justice League will even dent the full-steam-ahead complete comic-book-isation of Hollywood cinema, but, if this trainwreck can do any good, maybe, in future, we’ll be on the receiving end of one less slapped-together, ill-conceived superhero team-up movie.