Justice League: Warworld Review

A promising premise unfulfilled

Posted:

Jul 22, 2023 6:00 am

DC’s modern screen translations have always felt like the comic book movie equivalents of inside jokes: enjoyable to those familiar with the material but mostly inaccessible to everyone else. For better and worse, Justice League: Warworld, the latest effort in DC’s animated continuity, reinforces this.

Conceptually, Warworld is leagues more exciting than anything else in DC’s animated Tomorrowverse to date. Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman seemingly scattered across time, none of them the slightest bit privy to the fact they’re not on Earth anymore? Great! That’s a hell of a logline. Unfortunately, a lopsided structure erodes the promise of the premise. The first half, in which the super-trinity must piece together what’s happening to them, plays up its mystery more than well enough to keep stalwarts engaged before it all falls apart in the final act.

As effective as Warworld’s central mystery is, it doesn’t quite make up for the dull, mindless action comprising most of the runtime. These sequences are stodgy, repetitive, and relentlessly unimaginative, especially during the climax. There are only so many times we can watch Batman throw a Batarang – from similar angles, no less–-before it begins to feel like not enough attention was paid to making the fights more dynamic and engaging. Wonder Woman’s Wild West showdown with Jonah Hex is a doozy of an opener, but it only stands out because everything that follows feels markedly less inspired. The final 20 minutes become so concerned with setting up the next Tomorrrowverse movie that Warworld forgets to segue in a satisfying manner. The ending is abrupt, leaving viewers scratching their heads and asking, “That’s it?” Sure, we get plenty of answers by the time the credits roll, but we don’t get resolution. We needed a little extra something besides answered questions and obligatory fight scenes, but Warworld doesn’t rise to that challenge.

Jeremy Adams, Josie Campbell, and Ernie Altbacker, all superbly talented screenwriters with plenty of experience writing for DC, feel off their game here. The script feels too safe, too perfunctory to stack up against superior Tomorrowverse entries. The voice work is mostly serviceable, but it doesn’t touch the Tomorrowverse’s most inspired performances. Nothing in Warworld will stand out the way Darren Criss and Brett Dalton did as Superman and Parasite in Superman: Man of Tomorrow, but the cast gives it an honest go. Stana Katic’s turn as Wonder Woman/Diana Prince is hands down the film’s finest voice performance, but Jensen Ackles and Criss, reprising their respective roles as Batman and Superman, continue to do justice to DC’s heaviest hitters. Warworld’s big bad, the alien Mongul, is far from the most interesting of the DC Universe’s many supervillains, but Robin Atkin Downes injects enough energy and conviction into his role to make the character’s involvement intriguing.

Verdict

Justice League: Warworld boasts the stakes, tension, and scale of an event film but skimps on the emotional payoffs that would’ve made it a more satisfying experience. It isn’t a bad film, but it is a noticeable step down from the quality we’ve come to expect from DC’s animated stories.