Justice League Expands Frontiers of Unintentional Comedy

Yesterday I made the grave mistake of watching the movie Justice League, featuring scantily clad female role model Gal Gadot, star of the ludicrous Weinstein-tainted abomination known as Wonder Woman. I am here to give my objective, unemotional review. I will start by posting a photo of the unintentionally hilarious DVD-box photo. I think I know what Batman is saying in this picture.

“I can’t believe I ordered the volcano shrimp.”

Look at that. The Flash looks like a transvestite on his way to a rave. Cyborg looks like someone trying to escape from a crushed Fiat in a junkyard. Aquaman resembles a homeless person getting ready to fend off imaginary snakes with a broken umbrella. Batman appears to be distracted by severe lower-GI distress. He needs to visit the Bat-room (old joke). Superman has a thousand-yard stare, as if he’s asking himself if he’ll ever be in another movie where he isn’t wearing blue rubber long johns.

Did Ben Affleck even look at this picture before he signed off? Maybe he was rude to someone in the PR department, and this is his reward. They should have done a product-placement deal with Pepto-Bismol.

If you (correctly) thought Wonder Woman was a dumpster fire on a train headed for a bombed-out bridge, you will think equally highly of Justice League. It is a bountiful smorgasbord of ineptitude and inadvertent humor (the only kind of humor in the movie). It represents the final dregs squeezed out of the dessicated sponge known as the mind of Joss Whedon.

Incidentally, is it necessary for Joss Whedon to be in charge of EVERY comic book movie? Isn’t it bad enough that he IS the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Now we’re running from him when we watch DC movies. He’s like the annoying alcoholic aunt that ruins every family gathering (“Who told Joss? Can’t you people keep your mouths shut? OH, NO! HE FOUND THE COOKING SHERRY!”).

I watch virtually no network TV, but until recently, I recorded every episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is a Whedon operation. I had to delete it from my DVR’s series list. I couldn’t take it any more. Every week, they jumped a fresh shark.

“Hydra is gone. Hydra is back. SHIELD is shut down. Now it’s in business again. Whoops. Hydra is gone again. FOOLED YOU! IT’S BACK! Bored? We’ll cut Yo-Yo’s arms off with an electric Frisbee.” It’s like Whedon went on vacation and filled the writers’ office with confused janitors. As I’ve probably said before, I almost expected Scrappy-Doo to join the cast.

Is that reference too obscure? The Scooby-Doo show was terrible. It had one script. A mean guy has a hidden treasure, and he dresses up as a ghost to scare people away while he looks for it. Message: there are no such things as ghosts, kids! Cool kids are atheists! Now make sure you eat plenty of colorful dye and table sugar for breakfast every day.

The show was always bad, but when they really ran dry, they invented Scrappy-Doo, a grotesque Scooby Mini-Me with a tiny, stunted body and a big giant great Dane head. I would call him the Wesley Crusher or Leather Tuscadero of Scooby-Doo. Not an asset.

Whedon was also cramming the S.H.I.E.L.D. show with way too many Hispanic characters. Okay, we get it. You hate Trump. It’s very important to you that other people think you feel real bad about white privilege. But your show looks like a mariachi band. I keep expecting them to break into “La Bamba.” Can’t you find an American Indian or something? If he keeps it up, the show might as well move to Univision and use scripts written in Spanish. Then they can fight a real privileged, white, blue-eyed male villain: Jorge Ramos.

When the movie starts, Superman is dead. Maybe he looked at the script and decided to swallow kryptonite. Anyway, he’s dead, and the world is a mess, because one eccentric in a blue catsuit was solely responsible for our well-being. The whole world is moping.

In the midst of the misery, cheery optimist Batman develops a paranoid hunch. Someone out there is about to try to end the world.

YAWN. Can we have ONE movie where the world isn’t about to end? Can’t we have a movie where, say, Pennsylvania is about to end, but the rest of us expect to come out okay? I realize the stakes have to be high when you spend several hundred million dollars on a comic book movie, but audiences get tired of seeing film directors play the global apocalypse card every week.

Spider-Man movies managed to be bearable without involving the fate of the entire world. Just saying. It CAN be done. Provided you have an imagination and you occasionally think about something other than the mortgage payments on your latest villa on Lake Como.

The first evidence that Batman is right is an attack by what appears to be the Tin Woodsman’s fairy godmother. No lie. It’s one of the worst movie creatures in history. It’s a metal man with little foil wings just about big enough to get a turkey (other than this movie) off the ground. Look.

“I’m here with a quarter for the Tin Woodsman’s loose tooth.”

This is what minions do for money between Despicable Me films.

Batman rounds up Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, and a guy called “Cyborg.” Wow. Neat name. How long did it take to come up with that? He should have a sidekick: “Really Strong Guy.”

Cyborg is a man whose dad exposed his dead, mangled body to a magical cube in order to bring him back to life. The cube got rid of most of his human parts and turned him into a robot that sulks. Kind of like a titanium teenager. Only one part of his real body is left: a small amount of his head. It’s like Whedon went to the effects people who made Ultron and asked if they had any cheesy prototypes they would part with cheap.

I think I could have designed a better Cyborg myself, using Microsoft Paint. This is one of the few cases where the plastic action figure will probably look better than the actual actor.

Cyborg has no personality. If he ever had a personality, it must have been removed by the same cube that replaced everything except one side of his face. What is his remaining pound or so of meat good for, by the way? A real cyborg is a human being with mechanical parts. This guy is C-3PO plus one third of Mister Potatohead.

Like Wonder Woman, the movie features a battle in which the Amazons, the greatest female warriors in history, are crushed effortlessly, in a few minutes, by a hostile force. It’s because they happen to have a cube like the one that screwed up Cyborg. The villain, an old white guy named Steppenwolf, appears in their fortress and steals their cube. As usual, they fight in highly credible gold bikinis, proving women are powerful and capable and not just sex objects. Yeah. Most people don’t know that the SEAL team that took out Bin Laden wore gold bikinis.

Somehow men will be to blame for this. We are always to blame when women degrade themselves.

Remember; Harvey Weinstein had to sign off on everything.

Wonder Woman’s Wonder mom decides to call her for help, and as the leader of a sophisticated nation of elite forces, she uses some sort of ancient signal fire…because Amazons are too stupid to have cell phones! The Amazons aren’t very good at engineering. And it’s an island where everyone is female. Math is so hard! They need a big strong man!

In backward countries such as America and Russia, military forces use primitive inventions such as tanks, jets, and rifles. The brilliant Amazons ride around on horses, bearing advanced weapons far beyond our inferior testosterone-based technology. They fight with bows, arrows, and pointed sticks.

Who, exactly, are they supposed to fight, riding horses in circles on a tiny island no enemy can get to? Can someone explain this to me? Drop one MOAB, and you own the place. And if you don’t want to fight the Amazons, all you have to do is sail around their island.

It may sound strange for a man to say this, but I actually got tired of staring at Gal Gadot’s rear end in this movie. In one scene, her butt filled the entire screen…while she was talking to someone.

“Mr. Weinstein! Let go of the camera! The union won’t like this!”

They should have called the movie The League of Gal Gadot’s Extraordinary Behind, Thighs, and Crotch, because the camera focused on her pelvis over and over. It amazes me that filmmakers would play voyeur with a character who is supposed to inspire young girls to reach their potential. Well. No it doesn’t.

Ben Affleck looks like what he probably is: a borderline-obese old man who never works out, packed like sausage into a tight rubber suit that strategically shapes his loose meat so it moves to areas ordinarily filled by muscles. He walks like he’s wearing one of those sumo suits people put on in bars, or like a dysentery patient trying to make it to the toilet in time. In all seriousness, I don’t think he can put his arms down. He has no new toys, because DC Films only had SEVERAL YEARS to think them up. He has no superpowers. He needs to go back to the cave and think about retirement. He could get himself a nice cave in Boca Raton.

As for Aquaman, he’s a mean drunk with a bunch of trashy tattoos. He looks like the guys who spend half of their lives working on county farms and the other half on welfare. I could really see him appearing before a judge on a domestic violence beef involving his own mother. I think I saw him last year, in a crew of roofers who worked on my house. He never talks to fish once during the movie. There goes his big gimmick.

You should see the costume he fights in. I’m pretty sure it’s a bullfighting suit. Why aren’t our soldiers taking advantage of this new technology? It’s great camouflage. For battles that take place at Liberace’s house.

Lois Lane is a catastrophe. Henry Cavill is 35 and could pass for 25. He is in incredible physical condition. Amy Adams (Lois) is 43, looks older, and is quite hefty for a woman being paid millions to look good. If you gave me her salary to appear in a film, I think I could find it in my heart to lay off the Ding Dongs for a month. Why is she in this movie? The Lois Lane character shouldn’t be middle-aged or overweight.

It’s impossible to believe Henry would be attracted to her. I’m not. If she started talking to me in a supermarket checkout line, I’d begin inching toward the parking lot. I’ve actually done that.

Here’s the story that drives the movie: Batman, whose voice mysteriously changes every time he puts on his mask and eye makeup (?), assembles the team so they can battle Steppenwolf, and somehow we are supposed to be impressed, even though their best efforts bother Steppenwolf about as much as you or I would be bothered by enraged fruit flies.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER the only way they can beat Steppenwolf is to bring Superman back to life so he can do it for them, which explains why Henry Cavill is on the DVD box. Superman kicks the compost out of Steppenwolf with very little help from the Justice League, which makes you wonder WHY THEY ARE THERE.

Whedon’s liberal paranoia is transparent and insulting. The first major villain who appears on the screen is an old white guy with red hair, who wants to bomb civilization back to a “holy” age. Gosh, Joss, who could you have had in mind? The second big villain is the Nordic-looking Steppenwolf, who has a German name and wears Viking-like horns to drive the point home.

In an age where the only serious threats to man’s existence are Islam and North Korea, Joss Whedon is trying to save the world from white men who believe in God. This movie must have been a hit in Riyadh and Pyongyang. Wait…do they ALLOW movies in Pyongyang?

Even more disturbing…the real REAL villain of the movie is a trinity. Steppenwolf’s plan is to gather and unite three magical cubes. I’m not kidding. When they get together, they exude some kind of force that transforms the world into a place where it’s okay to admit Bruce Jenner is a man and where you can buy AR-15’s from vending machines that also sell Bibles.

When Steppenwolf assembles the cubes, he says, “Praise to the unity. The three as one.” Sound familiar at all? Praise? Hello? What kind of people use that word with regard to three powerful entities which are one? What religion could Whedon be sniping at here? So hard to guess.

Steppenwolf’s tin fairies serve him without absolute obedience. Gee. Is there a supernatural being who is surrounded by legions of servants who are commonly depicted with wings? It sounds so familiar…

Joss Whedon is not just an atheist; he’s a proselytizing atheist. He says it’s “very important” to understand that there is no God. He says that now, while he’s fairly young and expects to live a few more years. What he will say when he’s about to die may, and hopefully will be, different.

I don’t think he’ll be a factor much longer. His work is not going well. He must be having some kind of crisis. The crap dialogue in this movie is like something you would expect in fan-created Youtubes. Whedon has scraped the bottom of the creativity jelly jar once too often. There is nothing left. When the characters try to sound dramatic and inspired, they merely sound like Whedon mumbling cliches and platitudes into his mattress as he scrambles to meet a production deadline. He could be replaced easily by a Clever Comic Book Movie Dialogue Generator app. Maybe he already has one on his gluten-free iPhone.

The older I get, the sillier Hollywood seems.

John Wayne never fought a battle. William Shatner is five feet, six inches tall and has never left earth. Humphrey Bogart weighed about 120 pounds and couldn’t even beat up his wife, even when he tried. George Clooney is a college dropout, and the colleges he dropped out of are about as prestigious as barber college. Burt Reynolds is bald, and he was bald when he made his big films. Arnold Schwarzenegger is about three inches shorter than he says he is. Vin Diesel wears elevator shoes. All the action scenes we’ve seen in movies like Star Wars were actually filmed in front of big green screens in very quiet rooms, and the actors looked stupid, yammering about things that clearly were not there.

It’s all make-believe, and it’s just as silly as what kids do when they tie towels around their necks and pretend to be Superman. Batman, King Friday…what’s the difference?

I used to manage to suspend disbelief much better than I do now. These days, when I see grown people running around in superhero costumes, I feel an urge to ask them to hold out their bags so I can give them candy. Ben Affleck looks like a horse’s ass in his Batman rig. The inexplicable McGruff voice is the cherry on the sundae.

A recent news story said we have 14 more superhero movies on the way. That’s the current outlook; more could be scheduled later, depending on how desperate Hollywood gets. Critics are getting tired of them. Maybe audiences will follow. I can’t wait to see the trend end. I admit, I have enjoyed many of these films (especially the bad ones), but they’re not good for us.

I suspect Satan is behind our superhero obsession. After all, he and his friends created real superheroes. We call them demons. Loser angels with no future impregnated women, who, being women, who were probably very impressed by them. You know how women are. They always compete to land the captain of the football team, even if he’s a guy who, in four years, will be driving for Uber in his mom’s car.

Their offspring were beings with great physical stature and strength and the character of rats and hyenas. It is said that they ruled over human beings and even ate us. God killed their bodies, and now they roam the earth as doomed spirits, giving us cancer and starting fights and so on. It may be that in the future, people who are possessed and empowered by demons will appear to be real-life superheroes, and they may wear silly costumes (just like priests and cardinals) and demand worship. If they do, we will already be prepared to serve them. We already know how to make and distribute superhero merchandise.

Superheroes teach us pride. They teach us that flesh beings can be special and powerful in their own right. This is not true. All power and authority come from supernatural sources. If you want God’s power, you can’t run around in a ridiculous costume with a big “S” on it and call yourself “Superman,” which implies superiority. God fights people who have that attitude. In the eternal scheme, they are losers.

I will probably watch more superhero movies before I’m done, as long as they don’t cost me more than $5.99. It’s a guilty pleasure. It will be fun to see how many times the earth and/or the universe will be threatened with total destruction this year.