Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Justice League

Diana Prince is a part of the League, but League of Justice  is no Wonder Woman.

Justice League

Grade: C

Director: Zack Snyder (Man of Steel)

Screenplay: Chris Terrio (Argo), Joss Whedon

Cast: Ben Affleck (Town), Gail  Gadot (Wonder Woman)

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 2 hr

by John DeSando

“People said the Age of Heroes would never come again.”Diana (Gail Godot)

The super heroes of filmdom do come again, this time in Justice League, the DC equivalent of Marvel’s Avengers and other comic book communal power sharing. Smartly producers are seeing that a super hero like Superman (Henry Cavill) or Batman (Ben Affleck) is better served by having more heroes to expand audience and humanize.

In Justice League, Diana Prince is a welcome leader, having jumped into that spot no doubt because of her box office success in Wonder Woman early in 2017. Here she teams up with Cyborg, Flash, Batman, Aquaman, and Superman (recently resurrected) to defeat Steppenwolf (voice of Ciaran Hinds), who is bent on bringing back power and global destruction to the dark side.  The team motif, so popular in pulp fiction and sci fi these days, is best expressed by Commissioner Gordon (J.K. Simmons) to Batman: “Good to see you playing with others again."

Oh, well, nothing new here, especially with the usual out-of-date explosions and knock-abouts, both to me not worthy of advanced sci-fi but along with bullets, staples of the genre. The reliance here on fist fighting and gun shooting seems beneath the dignity of advanced civilizations such as ours. The banter is banal, and the wonder of the Wonder Woman film earlier this year places this epic in mediocre land far, far away from the Amazons.

With so much run-of-the-mill CGI as a central focus, no wonder plot is thin and characterization superficial. While director Zack Snyder tries to give enough time to each character to develop, too many of them mean too little rounding out their personalities and lives. What we have is what we have—a middling’ story of the same stuff told with characters just waiting for their own next motion picture. Please, no more Batman vs. Superman films—Justice League is close enough.

John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com

John DeSando holds a BA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Arizona. He served several universities as a professor, dean, and academic vice president. He has been producing and broadcasting as a film critic on It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics for more than two decades. DeSando received the Los Angeles Press Club's first-place honors for national entertainment journalism.