f13.net

I would avoid this if I were you.

I was very optimistic going in. I'm quitting halfway through. If I were in a theater, I'd give some thought to leaving. It's nostalgic in some very bad ways--it feels like watching something on Eighties television only with less plot coherence. It's a mess.

It's also LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG.  151 minutes and I sat through every one of them.  At least Pedro looked like he was having fun. 

There is like 15-20 minutes of good movie buried in all that.   Doesn't give me good hopes for Squadrons.

My wife enjoyed this a lot.  She's no movie snob at all, but there's enjoyment to be had here.

But yeah, lower your expectations.

It's not as good as the first but I liked it. Word of warning though, it leans HEAVY into the comic book fun/silliness that Shazam did. Those parts were actually my favorite. The story itself was a bit messy, lots of travel/time jumps that didn't exactly make sense. Geoff Johns' hand was real obvious in this one, specifically his love of nostalgic comic knowledge. And Ab is right, it is fucking long and at times it feels it. The first scene with young Diana was almost completely unnecessary even though it's tries to set up a resolution for the main conflict in a life lesson, but it doesn't quite pay it off. Like I said, I did enjoy it, but I can certainly see where a lot of the criticisms will come from and they will be mostly justified.

I thought it was entertaining enough. Obviously not as good as the first, but the first was extremely good up until the end. The "let's sell some extra action figures" outfit was goofy.

I ended up sticking through it. There's a few decent bits but the script is tonally incoherent and the narrative is at best uneven--there's a decent amount of WTF going on (WW doesn't even worry for one minute that Steve Trevor is basically possessing some other man's body and putting him in serious danger; rather than go back to his apartment to look for his passport they hijack a plane; they go from Cairo back to Washington in a few hours without any real tension; Wiig's transformation into the Cheetah is kind of nonsensical (if you were going to pick an 'apex predator' to satisfy a wish to be such, why a cheetah? it's not exactly what springs to mind). There's a lot of bad detail work in it: it feels like a film that got edited to death or where the script was worked over by too many people.

Pascal is maybe the best thing in it. There's some good more subtle stuff early on about men as leering, intrusive scenery hovering around the edges of womens' lives.

There's a weird inattention to what WW has been doing since 1919; you can feel WB giving up entirely on making a DCU out of the spare parts of their disastrous first run at it.

Is it at least free from grimdark Snyder cooties?

Yeah, 100%.

I'll give it a try then.

The more you think about it the worse it gets. Like I thought it was such a great touch to have the criminals in the opening sequence stop trying to get away in order to convince the one that took a child hostage to let her go. But then WW just beats the shit out of all of them anyways. And then for some fucked up reason drops them on a cop car from high enough to completely destroy the car? ...why?

Zero Snyder, so yeah, that's good.

The continuity and plotting could make for a good drinking game if you were in the mood. Like, at the beginning, Wiig's character tells a homeless guy to stay warm and people show up at a party with thick coats; a day later, Diana and Steve are flying through fireworks on the Fourth of July. The problem is really that they had a couple of narrative and character beats they wanted to hit (Diana gets over Steve and starts to live again; Diana learns to fly; Wiig wants Diana's seemingly easy and effortless sense of authority and power without working for it; the world learns that monkey's paw wishes are a bad idea; a Trump-like figure actually experiences moral growth; Wiig is the Cheetah because the Cheetah is a classic WW enemy) and then they did dumb shit elsewhere to make all those happen as required.

Snyder was a producer and I think there is some Snyder-esque shit in the 3rd act.

The dark fight with Cheetah at the end was a little Snyder-y but for the most part, there was too much humor for it to be Snyder-esque.

If you think about it much at all, the whole narrative falls apart. It has some real bad time jumps/travel issues (not quite Rise of Skywalker bad but still made me stop in the middle of the movie and go "WUT?"), and it is way too long. There's something to be said about having a movie with just Cheetah as the villain, doing away with the whole Pine resurrection bit and just make it a tight 90-120 minutes. Unfortunately for them, the Pine/Gadot chemistry and the resolution of that story beat is actually the best thing in the movie.

Basically I think you could have done a Maxwell Lord-tricked-by-the-Duke-of-Deception where the Duke himself shows up at the end--your basic Faust narrative where WW can't possibly beat the Duke down physically but has to remind Lord what he's losing, etc.

Or you could have done a Wiig-becomes-Cheetah--something to the effect of she spends time around Diana, admires her but envies her, gets tired of being a doormat and starts researching an ancient empowerment ritual she found in the museum and doesn't pay attention to the 'you will become feral and cruel' fine print at the bottom--Diana has to try and talk Wiig back into her best self while also beating the stuffing out of her. Maybe there's a McGuffin they're both racing to find that will either cure her or finish the transformation.

You can have Pine in the first one. In the second one, maybe he can be a thematic element--WW wondering why she can't move on in life, realizing she's too complacent, etc.

I see a lot of bending over backwards, this movie was unapologetically trash.

Can´t say I did not enjoy moments of the movie, but overall it was long drag. Not really worth it unless you got nothing else to do, so I agree with MeidumHigh. All the film really did for me, was to rewatch The Boys for some reason.

Fuck the modern trope of 2 or 3 villains per movie. Just stick to one and stop muddling things up and wasting my time.

I don't mind a villain who has a miniboss assistant or henchman (Thanos' team in Infinity War, say)--trying to handle 2-3 villains who each have their own narrative arc and require a different story is just a bad idea and it shows a lack of confidence on the part of the scriptwriters and director.

"People love CGI boss fights, but you can't fight the same boss 4 times in one movie. So let's put two or three villains in the movie, problem solved."

--Dave

I think the studios kinda assumes people wont stay interested if its the same fight with the same vilian. Plus the more villians and heroes, the more merchandise to sell.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhkBleDMvB0

If anyone needs a review, the one above is pretty good (and better than seeing the movie itself).

If they're worried about peoples' attention spans maybe don't make these movies 2.5 hours long.

Yes, there was a lot wrong with this movie, and its length is just one of those things. It's a movie I like despite the fact that it's a complete fucking mess from a structure standpoint. It committed a lot of movie sins at the conception stage and never really had any one piece that was so good, it excused all the other sins. The more I think about it a few weeks later, the less likely I am to ever watch it again, which for me (a DC movie fan) is saying something.

The length of the movie is definitely a giant fucking clue that it had some kind of huge editing problems.

I watched this last night. I think having the benefit of super low expectations helped. I enjoyed it. It wasn't as good as the first one but is far from the worst modern DC movie. It did feel bloated but I wasn't bothered by some things that bothered other people like her not caring Steve was in some other dude's body. I figured it was part of the effect of the wishing stone as it clearly warped people who made wishes.

It was fun and had some good character growth for Diana but definitely had some weirdness with the timeline and such.