Zack Snyder’s Justice League delights and dismays in equal measure for those who haven’t drunk the Kool-aid

Zack Snyder famously once inferred that his cut of JUSTICE LEAGUE would not be for children but let’s face it, at four hours long it’s not for grown-ups with children either, especially with cinemas closed and home viewing the only option. And it absolutely does not need to be four hours long. It’s obnoxiously lengthy, the product of a psychology that measures its potency in length rather than skilful application. There’s an obstinate, palpably petulant refusal to cut anything out of the movie so we get everything, whether it adds to the story or not.

Let’s get the TL;DR question out of the way first: is it a better movie than 2017’s JUSTICE LEAGUE? Yes. Is it a great movie? Ehh. It’s nearly as flawed as its predecessor but there’s a lot to be said for having a singular vision at the helm, no matter how myopic it may be.

Zack Snyder’s revisionist JUSTICE LEAGUE starts with an opportunistic bit of revision to another previous movie which feels odd because if he’d wanted to seed the follow-up he could have done so. After all, the lead balloon of BATMAN v SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE hadn’t dropped yet so everyone was unaware of the indifference with which the mainstream movie-going audience would greet his vision so he wasn’t yet constrained by so much studio interference. It dwells, with a dispiritingly ubiquitous sadistic glee, on the pain and trauma of Superman’s death in an unexpected homage to the opening of STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. It’s a heavy-handed manifestation of Luthor’s ‘God is dead, the dinner bell has been rung’ moment but what would you expect from an auteur who places his pantheon of characters above all but his own sense of divinity?

The expansive four hour run time (actually about three-and-a-quarter hours with forty-five minutes of various codas any of which would have made a fine mid-or post-credits scene but lumped altogether feel indecisive and overindulgent) and apparent unwillingness to leave anything on the cutting room floor brings problems of their own in structure and pacing. The first hour or so feels particularly disjointed and scattergun as it flits between set-ups for the various heroes who haven’t had their own movies yet, expanding on the scenes we saw in 2017 with mixed results, especially in the case of Aquaman (Jason Momoa) who gets two versions of basically the same scene (they were combined in the theatrical cut) and, bafflingly, a brief musical number. These are occasionally interspersed with scenes showing what the bad guys are up to or narrated exposition dumps but there’s a constant nagging feeling that they’re not in the right – or at least the best – order.

Where ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE really asserts its identity is in its tone. Once again, we’re treated to Snyder’s trademark ‘Let The Bodies Hit The Floor’ approach to comic book filmmaking before we’re even a tenth of the way in. The expanded Wonder Woman terrorist sequence is much darker, more violent and infused with that mean-spiritedness that seems to haunt Snyder’s DC work at every level. As a Director, he’s preoccupied with symbolism and imagery at the expense of everything else, including character and story. All is secondary to the aesthetic, which is probably why there are so many scenes of characters pausing and looking while a wind machine ruffles their hair and the soundtrack swells with pseudo-Celtic warbling. So many.

With the exception of Henry Cavill’s upper lip, the effects work here isn’t markedly better than the theatrical cut either and some of it – especially during the more frenetic battle scenes – looks a little worse. The character of Steppenwolf may now be 100% spikier but it’s an overly fussy and impractical design and too often looks like a Michael Bay TRANSFORMERS pre-vis animation. Performance-wise too, things are pretty much the same. Affleck is still a great Bruce Wayne and a good Batman, Gal Gadot does her usual job of looking good, adequately delivering her lines and hitting her marks while Momoa and Miller do solid work injecting some life and personality into what they’re given.

As promised, the most expanded role is that of Cyborg, whom Ray Fisher plays as angry, bitter and joyless, which doesn’t feel like much of a stretch. At least we do get much more of Jeremy Irons’ Alfred who’s always a delight, with just the right amount of sardonic disdain for his master’s chosen way of life. Nearly everyone else is basically superfluous to the central story (although it’s nice to see familiar faces reprise their roles from other DCEU movies, no matter how briefly (David Thewlis), perfunctorily (Willem Dafoe) or gratuitous (Jared Leto) they may be). Lois Lane and Martha Kent are particularly sidelined: Clark’s mother’s whole ‘losing the farm’ storyline is one of a number of things the script sets up for little pay-off or point and Lois is required merely to apparently hammer home the enduring theme of Snyder’s Superman: that this so-called beacon of truth, justice and hope gives nary a shit for the world or its people apart from Ms Lane and his Mommy. Forget the Christ allegories (which surface again like a persistently unflushable turd), there’s something downright Oedipal about Snyder’s take on the Last Son of Krypton.

The story of ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE is exactly the same as that of the theatrical cut and therein lies the film’s major flaw: it’s fundamentally just not a very good story and it’s made worse by a script that’s clumsy, obvious and occasionally contradictory. It has all the same moments of stupidity or illogic as the original and while it improves some sequences, it worsens others, leading to an almost zero-sum game. The villains remain two-dimensional and generic (unless you bring your own comic book knowledge to do the heavy lifting) and the stakes feel diffuse and ill-defined yet Chris Terrio keeps getting work.

And yet I found myself enjoying it because of, or maybe in spite of, its po-faced absurdities. Yes, occasionally, ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE is a hot mess of pretension, edge-lord darkness and indulgently factional fan service which takes itself and its creator far too seriously but for the most part it’s an earnest if misjudged attempt to view the superhero genre through the epic, mythic lens of the likes of LORD OF THE RINGS. While it doesn’t hit that lofty standard, it does genuinely feel like an ‘event’ movie and is all the more enjoyable for it. I had a lot more fun with it than I expected and if you can synchronise your expectations into a kind of unity with Snyder’s abundantly obvious strengths and weaknesses, it might just surprise you too.