Review of Justice League (2017) by Cdougall — 07 Aug 2021

Well, considering that Joss Whedon made extensive changes to this movie after Zack Snyder left the project, I’m pretty unimpressed by what we got in Justice League. This first big group movie for the DCEU brings together 6 superheroes, similarly to The Avengers, to help face a world ending threat.

On the surface, with Joss Whedon working on it, that all seems like a great idea considering how good the first Avengers movie was. Unfortunately, when you look at the fine print, this film doesn’t live up to any of those expectations and is a huge letdown in a lot of ways.

The acting is decent but the movie doesn’t make great use of it’s A-list actors, which it has a fair amount of. The story is nothing new and the script is pretty lackluster and doesn’t really give any characters moments to shine or do something memorable.

The scenes aren’t quite as bad as they were in Suicide Squad, but they only rise above them by a little bit and don’t really earn redemption from the two terrible movies of 2016, Suicide Squad and Dawn of Justice.

The dialogue is weird and awkward at times which makes the movie’s attempts at humor feel iffy and come short and even a lot of the serious scenes don’t work too well either. This movie doesn’t flow smoothly in the way that The Avengers did, making it feel like a drag and be unenjoyable at times.

The heroes themselves are a big problem. They are thinly written and given little backstory, so we don’t learn too much about them, which is an issue because we’ve seen very little of some of them before the movie.

Only half of the heroes had substantial appearances before the movie and they needed a lot more context and screentime to work and be effective in the movie. They feel underexplored both before and during the movie, which sucks because many of these characters are iconic and well known in the DC universe.

So, we have missed opportunities there. The final fight of the movie makes Steppenwolf, the villain, feel really underwhelming and doesn’t make him seem powerful enough to be a worthy adversary to the Justice League, which lowers the stakes of the movie a bit.

The end of the movie is predictable and cliche and doesn’t leave any surprises or twists waiting for us. My best description for this movie that it’s a poor man’s version of The Avengers and I wouldn’t recommend watching this movie to anyone who expects the big group film quality that we’ve seen in the MCU.