Justice League

If there’s one positive note I can voice in support of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, it’s that it produces a sort of tentpole amnesia — I’m sure I’ve seen stupider movies, but this one is so bad that it drives them from memory (at least until I think about the last Snyder film I encountered). Whereas Marvel’s ensemble films feel like fully realized worlds, DC’s effort to bring its flagship heroes together on the big screen feels like such a bloated exercise in excess that I frequently found myself wishing it had forgone a storyline or two in favor of actually following through on just a few of the many it introduces.

The film plays more like a series of sequences rather than a cohesive narrative whole, bouncing between set pieces and plot threads with all the attention to detail of a golden retriever in a room full of tennis balls. Snyder seems so preoccupied with his usual green-screen shenanigans that when he does get around to telling the story, it feels distinctly like an obligatory afterthought. Exposition is bluntly dumped in the audience’s lap through some of the most unnatural dialogue this side of The Room, and the plot is so riddled with holes that even Joss Whedon’s involvement after Snyder’s late-in-the-game departure couldn’t piece together a functional narrative.

That plot, such as it is, could just as easily have been lifted from any number of other films in its glutted genre and operates as little more than an arbitrary mechanism to put DC’s most profitable characters in the same frame. The script, despite being doctored by the usually competent Whedon, is appallingly structured and awkwardly paced. There’s an ambiguous extraterrestrial threat, some cosmic MacGuffin boxes for our heroes to track down, flying zombie insect fear vampires or something — by the time the story finally comes together (far too late in the second act), all I could muster was a bemused “So what?”

Ostensibly, the point of this entire doomed enterprise was to introduce the Justice League as DC’s counterpoint to Marvel’s Avengers franchise — the catch is, the Avengers films were built organically over the course of a decade of character introductions. In truncating that process, DC left itself in an almost impossible situation when it comes to establishing its protagonists. Jason Momoa’s Aquaman gets a big buildup but is then relegated to monosyllabic grunts. Ezra Miller’s Flash seems to exist solely to dispense one-liners. Ben Affleck continues to be a better Bruce Wayne than Batman, Gal Godot’s Wonder Woman squanders all the goodwill established by her solo outing, and Henry Cavill’s Superman is just as flaccid as ever. My list of qualms with both performance and characterization in this film would be longer than a month’s worth of word-count allotments.

Justice League is a mindless film, sure, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with that in the context of the superhero genre. What’s wrong here is that the film fails to be fun in the process. Snyder resorted to one of his favorite tactics, scoring his films with terrible covers of good songs, in the opening scenes of Justice League with a weak rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows.” As an incongruously lilting voice hit the iconic refrain, I found myself thinking there needed to be a new line added for this film’s purposes: “Everybody knows Zack Snyder should retire early.” Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action. Now Playing at AMC Classic River Hills 10, Carolina Cinemark, Regal Biltmore Grande, Epic of Hendersonville.