TAS Reviews: Justice League Dark (spoiler free)

So, I just saw the latest DCAU and it was good. This is a movie I had no idea existed until I saw some the clips that came out and decided to check it out for myself. Although it was more pretty, than good, I still had a fair amount of fun watching Justice League: Dark. Admittedly, I made the mistake of trying to watch this movie half asleep, and was surprised to see that when I came back to re watch it the first day later within the timespan of less than a day, I wasn't bored. This is a pretty fun movie, even if it's more pretty than fun.

The most surprising aspect for me was the music. Your average DCAU movie couldn't give a rat's ass about the music, but the score here was pretty great for an animated superhero film and was used to set, a dark brooding tone which complemented the equally well done, dark and brooding animation. There's a lot of beautiful animation to be found and a lot of vivid colours, especially in a sequence where they literally enter someone's mind. A good way to recover from the bland animation of The Killing Jone. The fight scenes were pretty good, no complaints there whatsoever.

I had the benefit of going into this movie with no knowledge of who was going to other than Batman. So every shot revealing a new character surprised me. My favourite character was surprisingly Constantine. I'm a fan of Matt Ryan's work as Edward Kenway in Black Flag, & he knocked it out of the performance with his performance here, once again. He had a lot of good material to work with, as did the rest of the characters. The dialogue was well written and the humour aimed for quality over quantity, a balance I hope more live action superheroes strive for.

Every character in the movie was utilised well for the most part.

To quote, or paraphrase, the person who convinced me to make time for this movie, "it's a DC movie on the supernatural end of the spectrum, what could go wrong?" Regardless of any flaws, it's still a DCAU movie which tonally lives up to it's title, and offers you a journey through the mystical spectrum of the universe from monsters, to something as simple as a dagger which emits blasts of ice, to visually psychedelic sequence. I'm glad Batman didn't steal focus from the movie and that we got a DCAU movie focused on smaller properties. Even the cameos from more well known DC characters were short, yet sweet.

This is a far from perfect movie which I think could've been a lot better. A lot of people are calling this the best DCAU installment in a longtime, and I can see why, but the stop-start structure of the movie reminded me of Kubo and the Two Strings, another which suffered from this video game-like structure. I wish the story progressed at a constant pace instead of stopping every 10 minutes explaining to us the NEXT mystical artefact or plot device, to no avail. As much as I love a work of fiction, I've found it hard to focus on finer plot details of the simplest story for as long as I could remember, so this movie was an assault on the senses for a guy like me. The story was pretty weak, giving me little reason to care whenever they delivered exposition. I wish this movie lived through a stronger story.

The other technical flaw in the movie was the lip syncing, which was more often off than on, breaking the immersion whenever it became noticeable. It could be because Kevin Conroy has done such a fantastic job as The Caped Crusader, but surprisingly Jason O'Mara as Batman was the weak link a sea of otherwise good performances.

Rating: 6/10. Entertaining, good dialogue and fun characters. Do yourself a favour and watch this movie if you're a DCAU fan, you'll probably love it more than I did!

Cheers for reading, guys.