Movie Review #20: Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

 

I do believe that this is the first time I've talked about comic book movies on here. I have to say that for the most part I do enjoy watching them but I must say I like comic books better. The ongoing lore of the stories works better there. I just like that better. Also it seems the tropes of action movies makes it hard for villains to return. Seeing as in most of these movies the villains die. I mean I'd like to see Angle Man and Dr. Psycho to show up but there's only a limited number of bad guys that work well on screen. I mean for most people who aren't sad nerds. Anyway I will probably end up watching every comic book movie that comes until they stop making them. I do like most of them but I don't get excited as I once did for them coming out. 

I must say that for the most part DC movies since Man of Steel have been pretty good. I did not like Man of Steel or Batman Vs Superman. I didn't like the Joss Whedon version of Justice League and you'd have to pay me an insane amount of money to watch the Zack Snyder version of Justice League. I have more important things to do like watch The Facts of Life. I liked Shazam a lot. Fun movie. I haven't seen Aquaman but it looks like a bunch of fun.  I also liked Birds of Prey that people on the internet who care way too much about angering woke people wanted to make sure everyone knows it was a failure at the box office. Jokes on them, I like Nothing But Trouble and Hudson Hawk and those movies made about 5 dollars in the box office. Stupid jerks.

I think the Wonder Woman movie from 2017 is my favorite of the more recent DC films. I liked the World War I setting, I dig it a lot when they put superheroes into different genres. I liked pretty much all of the characters and thought they worked well together. I felt the comedic scenes were fun and the dramatic scenes were well done. I even liked the last act that most people complained about. It was probably the most well made movie out of them. It's a shame that I really did not like Wonder Woman 1984.

This movie is pretty unremarkable and feels like a mish mash of a lot of other movies. The Cheetah is clearly Catwoman from Batman Returns or The Riddler from Batman Forever or Electro from The Amazing Spider Man 2. You know the weak meek person who as weak and meek loves the hero but becomes POWERFUL and then wants to smash the heroes face in. I guess these characters had more fun and creative comic book origins and it's sad to see them just get a boring origin like that. I dunno. That's just me. I also don't like when a lot of these movies use two or more villains. One of them just gets lost in the whole thing. Like In The Amazing Spider Man 2, Harry Osborn just becomes the Green Goblin in the last like 10 minutes. No joke. It's done a bit better here but it still feels like you could have removed The Cheetah from this entire film and nothing would have been missed.

The whole plot of this movie involves a magical wishing rock thing that Maxwell Lord gets and then becomes the rock and then at the end Wonder Woman gives off a whole Care Bears like speech about truth and Maxwell Lord gives up his wish which is something the evil bad guy God should have not made possible. I'm like did this stuff happen? Will people forget about all of this because he renounced his wish? They must because they forgot about Wonder Woman when she returned in like Batman V. Superman and they'd have too because she was a big part of this whole thing and people would remember the warrior lady who SAVED PEOPLE FROM NUCLEAR WAR.

I wouldn't have cared about any of these plot holes or tropes if I was amused by this movie but I really was not. I liked some of the action scenes but for the most part this film was a slog to watch. Also body swapping works in goofy comedy movies and becomes weirdly creepy when you put it in a more serious film. Like to be serious did Wonder Woman like sexually assault that guy who Steve Trevor's body was in... It's weird and creepy. Leave body swapping to the 8th Freaky Friday remake. It will be more fun to watch.

FINAL VERDICT: A poor slog of a sequel to a pretty good film. I watched both back to back and it would probably been more enjoyable to just watch the first movie two times in a row.