Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
The creators of Justice League Unlimited had a real stroke of genius in casting CCH Pounder as Amanda Waller in that animated series. Since then, she’s reprised that role five more times: thrice for the Arkham video games, once for an adaptation thereof, and once, here, in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. She’s not the only returning player, either, as Kevin Conroy returns to once again voice Batman, Tim Daly is back as Superman (having voiced him in the self-titled Superman animated series but not the Justice League shows), and the inimitable Clancy Brown once again gives voice to supervillain Lex Luthor. One could almost mistake this as a continuation of that franchise, given the high amount of character crossover, but there are certain elements that make that impossible (most notably the presence of Power Girl, here voiced by Smallville alum and cult leader Allison Mack, when the equivalent in JLU was a Supergirl clone named Galatea), although no one can stop you if that’s what you want to believe.
This animated film, which is the first of the movies in this project that was a first time watch for me, loosely follows the plot of the 2003 comic arc of the same name. In the comics, that arc began the end of an ongoing DC comics story, namely the ascendancy of Lex Luthor to the presidency (starting in Action Comics #773 in November 2000) and the resultant fallout. This movie wisely skips over his election and inauguration and skips through a montage of unrest that gives way to order as Luthor enacts his agenda. One facet of said plan was to deputize several superpowered people to act as his national response squad, while other heroes with good reason not to trust him refuse to join up with his enforcers, notably the two named in the movie’s title. They’re still out there doing what they do, of course, simply without the spotlight. This becomes more complicated when astronomers observe an inbound city-sized meteor made of Kryptonite on a collision course with Earth. Lex makes a show of extending an olive branch to Superman, only to use their meeting as a trap to force an altercation between Supes and Metallo, here imagined as a Terminator with a Kryptonite heart. Outmatched, Superman is rescued by Bats and they escape into the sewers, but Luthor uses doctored footage of his meeting with the Man of Steel to make it look like Superman attacked the president, with Lex not only framing him but blaming the inbound meteor’s effects as the cause for Superman’s sudden change in morality and putting out a bounty on the hero, driving him and Batman completely underground, where they must try to figure out a solution to prevent the apocalypse raining down on them should Lex fail.
With that stacked cast and a fairly decent plot outline, this one had a lot of potential, but unfortunately, it’s ugly as shit. No offense to anyone who worked on this movie; I know that this is a corporate product that required strict adherence to the approved character design (and in this case I do mean design, singular – the current page image for the TV Tropes page for “Heroic Build” is a still from this movie, in which three men have essentially identical bodies to one another, which are also identical to those of every other man on screen), but it looks awful. One thing you could never say about the other movies before this one was that they never looked or felt cheap, but this one more than any of the others I’ve seen, before or after this one in production, looks like such garbage. There appears to be an insistence on maintaining consistent lighting/shadow on certain characters’ faces in order to make their faces dynamic (this is particularly evident on Luthor; I think they’re trying to create the impression of cheekbones, but I can’t be sure), but those light/shade spots remain the same no matter how the angle or lighting changes within the scene. The giant faces, combined with exaggerated musculature on a body that’s not quite proportionate as a result of said exaggeration, makes this look like it took design inspiration from The Super Hero Squad Show – a series aimed at preschoolers based upon a toy line of the same name, wherein Marvel heroes had deformed bodies that were easy to grab with little dexterity and difficult to choke on (think Fisher-Price Little People). It’s not the aesthetic that you really want your audience to think about when you’re trying to get adults on board with your little direct-to-video for-a-more-mature-audience mandate. In the film’s defense, this is pretty similar to the comic from which it takes inspiration, but this is proof positive that what works on the page won’t necessarily translate to the screen.
If you can get past that (or just get used to it), there’s a decent enough story here, although the throughline with Power Girl transition from working for Lex’s government squad to working with Superman and Batman is the weakest element. Mack was riding high at the time of release; Smallville was still on the air, and Chloe Sullivan was the show’s breakout character (at least until Justin Hartley’s Green Arrow came along), and the comic had enough time to devote to showing her questioning her allegiances that it didn’t feel rushed. Here, the decision to keep this unsure loyalty as an element of the narrative while sprinting towards getting her on the side of our heroes makes the whole thing feel rushed and cheap, just like the rest of the plot. Amanda Waller is a welcome presence, but she’s given almost nothing to do, other than to try and convince Luthor to come up with a backup plan in case his plan to detonate the Kryptonite meteor with nukes fails (it does). The most interesting thing about his movie ends up being the relationship between its two leads, who genuinely feel like friends—very different people, obviously, but with a casual easiness between them that speaks to years of caring about each other deep down—in a way that’s usually absent from most adaptations, and most comics, if we’re being honest. Their banter, which at times is so familiar that it borders on loving, is rather fun, and will be the only positive thing that I remember about this movie when all of the chaff of its failures is burned away.
The “Lex loses his mind because he’s juicing himself with Kryptonite steroids” angle is goofy, but once he’s ‘roided out and in that green and purple mech suit, he’s still pretty scary. I will say that this movie has been largely forgotten (as have a lot of these earlier animated flicks from Warner Premiere), but unlike the others we’ve discussed, its tangential connection to real world politics means that this one does still generate some interest and friction in certain corners of the internet. Lex’s ascension to the U.S presidency predated the 2016 election by over a decade and a half, but there are people online who can’t help but bring up the “evil businessman becomes President” connection even when the comparison is vapid and facile. It’s not that there’s not a long history of Luthor/Trump correlations that goes back to even before I was born; Luthor’s reimagination as a businessman instead of his traditional “mad scientist” persona came about in 1986 as a response to real life anxiety about corporate power, with Trump as the model.
For most of these movies, edits of the pages relating to them on the aforementioned TV Tropes are all but ancient; for instance, the “Your Mileage May Vary” tab for First Flight was last edited in May of 2022 for grammar reasons. In comparison, the same tab on the article for this film was last edited eleven days ago as of this writing, which is bananas for a fourteen-year-old movie with such little public awareness, but there are still ongoing editing wars about whether or not this movie is “Harsher in Hindsight” because a supervillain did become our president for a while. Comparing Trump to this Luthor is a mistake, though, as this one only descends into madness after introducing a period of relative pax Romana, improving the economy and, in the words of one of the characters, he “put that formidable intellect to work doing such a good job [that] no one will have a choice but to respect him.” Although that statement is immediately followed up with “It’s all about ego now,” which is true about the former president, one would be hard pressed to identify him with the first statement. The comparison here does a disservice to Lex Luthor and paints a real person who struggles to rise to the level of “competence” as some kind of talented mogul.
Compare this to the presentation of Luthor in the series Young Justice, where the Lex of the first two seasons (which aired in 2010 and 2012) is a formidable enemy because he’s always several steps ahead of the protagonists, to seasons three and four (which aired 2019-2022), where he becomes much less of a threat at the same time that he starts paraphrasing and/or quoting Trump, including soundbites about “fake news” and “good people on both sides” and tweeting “SAD!” I didn’t like that plot development there at all, not because I have any sympathy for the orange bastard, but because it turned a well-developed character into an SNL parody. For what it’s worth, the currently running Harley Quinn series’ choice to play Lex as more of a parody of Elon Musk—a businessman whose “inventions” are just ideas he purchased from others and whose self-proclaimed supergenius is a facade that only fools morons—is a much funnier bit. That having been said, the Lex of Public Enemies does turn into a madman at the end, more interested in allowing the extinction level event to occur so that he can rule over the ashes than preventing the meteor from hitting the Earth, which is something that I can see 45 doing, so there’s that.
That’s enough discourse for one day. This one has a pretty good narrative, but if you’re following these movies for frenetic action and dynamic animation, you can skip it. You’ll spare yourself some trouble.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Swampflix 