If there were any justice in the world...

So then; Justice League. I was toying, in the name of mirth (predominantly my own) to start waxing lyrical about how much fun this movie was, how DC have finally pulled something interesting and pleasant to watch out of their cinematic bag or how Zack Snyder had progressed and grown as a director and was no longer relying on hack scripts, slow motion and gimmickry to ply his trade. It's over a day late to be making April Fool's jokes though, so I'm just going to jump right on in and let you know that Justice League is exactly as bad as I suspected it would be, although it isn't the horrendous shower of shit that Batman vs Superman was. Having now watched it not an hour ago, I do begin to understand why people were hailing Wonder Woman as the best DC film of the current phase, although that's a little bit like being diagnosed with Tuberculosis, Bronchitis and a brain tumour and picking Bronchitis as your favourite. Yes, it's the least terrifying of the lot, but I still wouldn't wish it inflicted on most people (there are always caveats) and you're not likely to enjoy any of them anyway. The only good thing coming out of Justice League is the fact that they are at least consistent; poorly executed, befuddled nonsense, but consistently so. Pats on backs all round.

You don't necessarily need to have watched Batman vs Superman or indeed Wonder Woman to be able to follow Justice League save for the fact that Superman is dead. The fact that I can't recommend watching those movies shouldn't impinge on your ability to watch, be confounded by and hate this movie either, so at least I've saved you a couple hours of your life. True to form, the first 30 minutes of this film is spent introducing characters that you'll cease to care about by the end as Bruce Wayne bimbles about the globe trying to track down Aqua-Drogo, Flash the Annoying Nerd and The Incredible Half-Tinfoil Man. Everybody is also super-bummed about Superman being super dead, including some guy who randomly decides to kick over some oranges (because screw you oranges) in a montage introduction lifted straight out of Watchmen, set to another slowed down Indie drivel cover version. Seriously, it's like Snyder only knows some three cinematic narrative techniques and is just ploughing them to death and cashing the cheques before he's found out. 

Once it gets going, the plot is effectively exactly the same as one of the Transformers movies, although I forget which one. They really all have blurred into one and with Cyborg looking like an early and unused rough concept for whichever indistinguishable Cybertronian it was (let's go with Megatron for the sake of argument) it starts getting really difficult to keep track of which franchise I'm watching. Apparently the big bad here, Steppenwolf has taken precious time out from the reunion tour and is searching for three Mother Cubes which are hidden by Amazonians, Atlanteans and Humans and when put together are the key to turning Earth into Cybertron... sorry whatever Hellish dimension Steppenwolf calls home. I hear it may be somewhere near Luton. Thing is, it's never really clear why he want to do that. He's just sort of maniacal by default, planning to devour the universe one planet at a time then perhaps flipping them for a profit to other inter-dimensional bad guys in need of a second home. Maybe he's racing Unicron. He also seems to appear in a beam of light reminiscent of a Star Trek transporter, but I'm not really sure where from or who's sending him on away missions. Darkseid is mentioned once, presumably to stop the fanboys from losing all interest and then literally never referenced again. The Mother of Horror is referenced a few times as the progenitor of the aforementioned cubes but that goes absolutely nowhere at all. I suppose this is what happens when you copy/paste a screenplay; you lose all the intricacies you might have if you wrote it yourself.

Let's get to the real rub though shall we? If you've been here long enough, you will no doubt recall my incandescent, bile-inducing and all-encompassing hatred of Superman. So there was always going to be a point in this movie where my rage meter filled up and I became 90% likely to launch something. So our newly formed Justice League revive the man of worm food using the last Mother box, he wakes up with amnesia and starts to squish Batman's tiny little skull. Can't say I blame him; Affleck spends the entire time being a douchebag and looks more robotic in his batsuit than Cyborg who is literally supposed to be half-machine. So in his moment if ultimate peril (that you know isn't too perilous because there are scenes in the trailer with Batman we haven't got to yet) he gets Alfred to call in the big guns. We're obviously supposed to think that he's got a stash of weaponised Kryptonite he can drop on Superman at will, but we all know that isn't going to be the case. So when the inevitable happens and Lois Lane fulfils her womanly duty of breaking up the fight nobody here should be surprised. Worse than that, they fly off to the Kent farm and ol' Supes literally only remembers hating Batman and loving Lois; after maybe a weekend he's all fully memoried up and ready to go off to be the unstoppable and unstoppably dull deus ex machina that he always is. Steppenwolf does the old classic of 'suddenly becoming vulnerable just because he's facing a team' thing before being dragged off into the teleporter by his own minions. Earth saved, hoorah, congratulations to all involved.

To describe this as insufferable would be a flagrant misuse of the word. Bilge would be closer, if a little too nautical. There's nothing redeeming here at all and for the most part, nothing makes sense. Why do the dying paradaemons leave a clue to the Mother Boxes in their residue? Why have neither the Amazons or the Atlanteans done nothing more than leave their boxes out in the open rather than burying them somewhere really hard to reach and guarding that? Why is absolutely nothing the Flash says throughout the entire movie even remotely funny, despite him clearly being the comic relief? It's baffling.

The best thing to come out of this movie is that actually I wasn't disappointed. I felt like the inside of my brain had been soiled by the cinematic equivalent of a thousand diarrhoea-stricken baboons, but I wasn't expecting anything less, so disappointment wasn't a thing. And for the record, the digital make-up they did on Henry Cavill's moustache was both very apparent and truly awful.