Justice League Dark is an animated science fantasy superhero film. The plot revolves around a team of DC Superheroes, the more mystical ones, who have to investigate a pattern of strange behavior that has turned fatal. The Justice League themselves can’t understand the problem, so it is down to Batman (Jason O’Mara), and his strange collection of allies to save the day.
*Justice League Dark is one of my favourite DC comics, I have read many runs of the team over the years, so when I heard about this project, I knew I had to check it out. I was disappointed, this was an incredibly average film, nothing more, nothing less.
I will admit it was nice to see the team of Constantine (Matt Ryan), Zatanna (Camilla Luddington), and Deadman (Nicholas Turturro), get together; furthermore, it was nice to see Matt Ryan return to play Constantine, he is fairly synonymous with the character to me. However, my issue was the overall story just felt flat. The best issues of the comic have strong horror elements, but I didn’t get that here, other than the shades and a few other things it was mainly without horror.
What’s more though I liked Constantine I felt that a lot of the other characters were short-changed so that he could have more screen time. An example of this would be Swamp Thing (Roger Cross), who has been a major part of the team before in the comics, here only gets a few lines. Worst of all after he gets defeated, he just goes away and we don’t see him again, which feels like a big unresolved plot thread.
As I said before, this film is everything I would expect from a Justice League Dark film, a group of the more mystical DC heroes fighting against a supernatural opponent, but that isn’t enough to sustain my interest across the film’s runtime, I wanted more. More depth to the characters, more scope to the narrative, I don’t know exactly what but, something that felt better than bog standard.
Overall, this film fell short my expectations, it didn’t wow me in anyway, in fact it annoyed me a lot of the time. I wish they had put more time and energy into the characters and the story overall, if they had this might have been something special.
Pros.
Matt Ryan.
It is nice to see all of the characters team up.
A solid foundation.
Cons.
Other than Constantine and Zatanna very weak characters.
How they handled Swamp Thing.
2.5/5
Reviewed by Luke
Another Millennial Reviewer 