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Isn’t that what glory holes are all about?

I meant to post this last week but apparently got distracted.

Impressions:

Like Aquaman, no matter how hard DC tries, I will never be able to take Captain Boomerang seriously. Is there someone out there demanding more Captain Boomerang? Who are you? What makes you tick!?

Ahem. Let’s start with the bad. The writing’s pretty awful, even for a film about clowns fighting men in tights. There’s a few amusing one-liners here and there (although Boomerang getting snarky over puns? Are you kidding me?), but if you take a close look at almost any part of it, it gets really stupid, really fast. The basic framework of your typical heist is every member having their own unique talent (made even easier by adding superpowers) to pull it off. At the start for the initial break-in, they kind of did that, but after that? Pfft. Boomerang may as well have not existed at all and Spider’s only reason for existence was so Bats could dress up like him. Let’s not even discuss Batman bringing along a spare costume to dress up a murderer as himself and then leave him unbound to stagger around Arkham either. The only point of that seemed to be so Joker could be surprised when his head exploded.

That was a consistent issue with the already minimal plot. Too much went the route of the noisy balloon phhbtting out with a whimpering fart. Of particular was the triangle between Harlie, Deadshot, and Joker. They couldn’t seem to make up their mind what they were doing with her before just jettisoning it entirely at the end so she could have a brief bout of punchies with Batman, an unrelated third party. Frost and Boomerang saw similarly anticlimatic ends to their part in the affair. The whole Arkham jailbreak in general just struck me as a weak attempt at fanservice; all noise and little purpose. Hell, after I think three vignettes of Ivy murdering people with giant plants and sending out an army of mind controlled guards, they chased her off by lobbing some tear gas in her general direction and that was that.

The good though, is that the issues mainly come at the end of things and how it doesn’t live up to a lot of things it spent most of the movie setting up. It’s extremely well animated, action packed, fairly well directed barring a few moments that were a tad too corny, and again, there are some good one-liners here and there that made me chuckle more than pretty much any comedy this season has. It was mostly fun while in motion, but when you stop to take stock and think about it, it’s really impossible to not see how much of it was held together on nonsense and bizarre contrivance.

There are a few other issues, mainly concerning some clearly-not-into-it voice acting and Deadshot being kind of dull compared to the rest. If all you want to do is turn your brain off, grab some popcorn, and watch some action for an hour, it’s absolutely worth it for that if nothing else.