“Technology is like any other power,” Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman says in this latest and leas𝓰t superhero team-up. “Without reason, without heart, it destroys us.” Apparently DC didn’t get the memo. “Justice League”🍰 is a pointless flail of expensive (yet somehow cheap-looking) CGI that no amount of tacked-on quips, or even Gadot’s luminescent star power, can rescue.
Like Cyborg (Ray Fisher),🦂 one of its ostensible heroes, “Justice League” is patched together from disparate elements. Original director Zack Snyder (“Batman v. Superman”) left partway through due to a death in the family, leaving Joss Whedon (“The Avengers”) to finish up. The result? All the plodding, gray, generic action of a Snyder film with stabs of Whedonian humor that almost never feel organic. There’s no sense of purpose here, not even a sense of place.
“I don’t recognize this world,” Jeremy Irons as butler Alfred laments to his boss. “I don’t need to recognize it,” says Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck). “I just need to save it.” Exactly. Insert one random abandoned warehouse after another in which our heroes lob heavy objects at … who’s the power-hungry villain, t𒁏his time around? Ah yes, Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciaran Hinds), who isn’t a ’70s rock god but a horned demon aiming to 📖assemble some mysterious magic boxes so he can take over the worlkjzshdalkfhsdfs . . . Sorry. Just fell asleep at the keyboard.
Anyway — spoilers here for “BvS” — the Earth’s beloved defender, Superman (Henry Cavill), is dead, so Bruce is rounding up some other superpower-endowed peeps he’s been creepily surveil💖ling with his rich-guy tech toys. The movie careens from one character’s intro to another with no regard for either exposition or transition. It genuinely often feels like there’s nobody at ♌the helm, or maybe just a bot randomly deploying comic-book tropes.
Pity the actors who signed on thinking this would be a lark like “The Avengers,” Whedon’s good-natured 2012 Marvel pic. Jason Momoa could have been (and maybe yet will be) fab at reinventing the silliest of all superheroes, Aquaman, as a strutting Neptunian wildman. Here he’s just a fish-man out of water, reduced to yelling “Wahoo!” as he car-surfs on the Batmobile. Fisher’s Cyborg, the sole black character in the all-white team, first appears with his face obscured by a hoodie (re🌼ally?). His screen time consists almost entirely of droning on about his ability to synch up with computers. Bazinga!
Affleck is♒ deeply bored, boring and oh-so-chinless in that leather cowl, while Gadot grins and bear♑s the Snyder-tastic close-ups of her butt in tight leather pants. Other female characters seem like dutiful afterthoughts: Amy Adams’ Lois Lane, Diane Lane as Superman’s mom, Amber Heard as some nebulous sea-princess and the Amazons in Wonder Woman’s hometown, Themyscira, making the most cursory of appearances, subsumed to a plot that might have been written by two 7-year-old boys making “Pew pew pew!” fighting noises. What I presume to be Whedon’s punched-up dialogue yields a couple of amusing moments — the truth-extracting power of Diana’s magic lasso is always good for a laugh — but never really shakes up what feels like a joyless march to the credits.
The exception is Ezra Miller (”Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”) as The Flash, who manages, at least, some mischievous good cheer. He radiates humanness where most of the actors look perplexingly like Madam Tussaud’s renditions of themselves. In each tableau of the struttingꦜ, posing league (sadly, there’s more th💮an one), you can count on Miller for a little side-eye, all but breaking the fourth wall to implore us to have a little fun.
But even The Flash 🅘can’t out-run the sucking maw of this unambitious movi🌸e, which concludes with a post-credits scene all but assuring us there’ll be a sequel anyway. Truly, there is no justice.