Jason O’Mara

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Bad Blood (2016)

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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. 

We’ve talked a little bit about the CW’s “Arrowverse” series of shows in this feature, but there’s one name that hasn’t really come up here yet, and that’s Batwoman (no, not that one). The interconnectedness of the so-called “Bat Family” is already a tangled web, and it gets more tangled every year, so I’m not going to get into that, but suffice it to say that the current Batwoman, aka Kate Kane, was introduced in 2006 as an updated version of an earlier character, one who was introduced for the sole purpose of showing how super not-gay Batman was in the wake of Frederic Wertham’s infamous censorship call-to-arms, The Seduction of the Innocent. As a way of thumbing the industry’s collective nose at Wertham and his regressive quackery, Kate was explicitly made a lesbian. This was a big deal at the time (as someone who was reading Young Avengers, which featured a gay couple in the form of Wiccan and Hulkling, I can tell you that the contemporary comic letter pages were a fiery, brimstone-y place), and in some ways still was at the time that Batwoman, the 2019 TV series, premiered – at least, if the neanderthal braying of online agitators in the wake of the show’s airing is anything to go by. In the series, which follows the characterization of Kate/Batwoman that was introduced by our old friend The New 52, Bruce Wayne’s cousin Kate returns to Gotham some time after the abdication of the city by its Dark Knight, and she discovers the Batcave and all the gadgets, retrofits them to suit her needs, and then sets out to clean up the city. Tale as old as time, right? 

Among the DC CW shows, Batwoman was the most … cursed, one could say. The first season never completed filming because of COVID, the lead performer (Ruby Rose) left between seasons one and two, and the show’s mixed messaging about the role of the “Crows,” a private security firm headed by Kate’s father, was questionable even before BLM and has only grown more tone deaf over time. Reports have been mixed for years as to whether Rose was fired (for alleged behavior on set) or quit (due to being pretty badly injured during some stunt filming and not taking adequate recuperation time), and although we’ll probably never know for certain, I can say that I think Rose leaving was to the show’s benefit. That tone deafness regarding “non-police” police was rampant all over the first season, to the point where, although I would never agree with the bigots who hated the show on principle about why, they weren’t wrong that it … kinda sucked. 

Rose’s exit allowed for the show to go in a different direction. Javicia Leslie was cast as Ryan Wilder, an ex-con out on parole following a short term she served following some poor police work (redundant, I know) on the part of the Crows; when Kate’s plane crashes near where Ryan has parked for the night in the van that she’s living in, Ryan finds the batsuit and puts it to work right away. She was a completely fresh take on the character, and that allowed for new and interesting developments. In the first season, the romantic conflict comes from the fact that Kate and her love interest, Meagan Good’s Sophie Moore, were in military training together before Kate was given the boot for failing to follow “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” while Sophie didn’t speak up for Kate or herself and is still deeply closeted by the time of the pilot. Batwoman’s archnemesis, Alice (as in “of Wonderland”), is also tied to Kate because—spoiler alert—she’s actually the long presumed dead twin sister that Kate hasn’t seen since her supposed death when they were in elementary school. It didn’t help that Rachel Skarsten’s not-quite-Joker performance was the most interesting thing about the series, either, making her more engaging and magnetic than our purported hero. 

So, as season two begins, you have a whole supporting cast who not only don’t know if Kate’s dead or alive, but who also have no idea who this new person in Kate’s costume is. Skarsten’s Alice has to find something new to obsess over now that she can’t just keep pestering the sister she blames for never finding her, and her attempts to play on the guilt of that become a no-sell for Ryan, who grew up in the foster system. To their credit, the CW DC shows often tried to address social issues, and even when their heart was in the right place, it did so pretty clumsily (Black Lightning did it best, obviously, while Supergirl was a real roller-coaster of comrade/allyship). When it was made a selling point of the show, it was often to the show’s detriment. For me, this comes through most clearly in Batwoman’s first season treatment of Sophie, where filthy rich white woman Kate Kane lives in constant judgment of Sophie’s past choices. Kate’s constant exhortations that Sophie should come out of the closet are pure Western neoliberalism, dictating the lives of others without real knowledge of their lived experiences and dangers. But, because it had to pull a soft reboot before it ever really got going, Batwoman was able to do more and be a more interesting text for discourse because it wasn’t a “message” show, or it was at least no longer trying to send the same message that it was from its initial conception. Over time, Ryan and Sophie grow closer without all the emotional baggage of what Kate and Sophie had in the past, and this is the only show that I can think of offhand which had a queer relationship between two Black women as its primary romance storyline. It ended up being a lot better than it had a right to be. 

This is all yet another long lead up to me talking about an animated DC film, because this one introduces the Kate Kane Batwoman to this continuity. Batman: Bad Blood opens some six months after Batman vs. Robin, in a pretty cool sequence in which several C-tier Bat-nemeses are gathered in a warehouse and a familiar cloaked figure starts to take them out from the shadows—except, as the firing of a handgun from the darkness reveals—this isn’t Batman (Jason O’Mara), but Batwoman (Yvonne Strahovski). Batman soon intervenes himself, but in so doing, he ends up being blown to bits when the warehouse explodes. The absence of Batman, highlighted by the fact that the Bat-signal is going unanswered and the public has started to notice, leads to Bruce’s son Damian (Stuart Allen) being drawn home, and prompts the return of Nightwing/Dick Grayson (Sean Maher) as well, while Kate enlists her father’s help in trying to find any evidence that Bruce is still alive. Dick finds himself forced to take on the mantle of Batman—something that was his greatest dream as a child before it morphed into the thing that he wanted to escape from most as he matured—but when he recognizes Kate, he unmasks himself to her and takes her on as a probationary member of the team. They’re further joined by yet another new Bat-hero, Batwing (Gaius Charles), who is the son of Wayne Enterprises’ Lucius Fox. 

The villain this time around is someone called “The Heretic,” whom Batman seemed to recognize despite his mask in the moments before his death. We in the audience even get a glimpse of the man beneath when he does, but this franchise’s aforementioned difficulty in differentiating the faces of its square-jawed manly men ensures that it means nothing to us. It turns out that he’s operating under the direction of Damian’s mother and Bruce’s ex-lover, Talia al-Ghul (Morena Baccarin), who also has the Mad Hatter and his mind control tech as integral parts of her plan. The Bat Brigade invades her hideout and manages a rescue of Bruce before the fifty-minute mark, and then the real evil plot kicks in: Talia’s turned him into a Batmanchurian Candidate, with the intention of using Hatter’s tech to take over Gotham City (and then, of course, the world). From there, the film dissolves into a series of (admittedly well-executed) cliches, with the finale taking place aboard a floating tech summit. We get our designated girl fight between Talia and Batwoman, Batman’s brainwashing is broken by one of those “I know you’re in there somewhere” speeches, and a floating base is prevented from colliding with Wayne Tower at juuuuuuuust the last second. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s fun, and sufficiently exciting. I got a real kick out of watching all of these folks flying around in their costumes; it gave me flashbacks to watching G-Force/Gatchaman in my youth. 

It’s telling that I had more to say about the Batwoman TV series than I did about this movie. Funnily enough, this one goes back to basics with its Kate Kane, as she is decidedly not Bruce’s cousin here. The most interesting thing about this one is that it gives us a chance to see how these characters play off of each other when the title character is missing, where we have a void in the center of this narrative that creates an opportunity for us to spend more time with the others. Dick and Damian are the most fun together that they have ever been here, and the backstory that Dick and Kate knew each other because of cotillions and such is a nice detail. That still highlights some of the film’s weaknesses. These have become self-perpetuating now, so there’s no need to think too hard about certain details; for example, it would have been much more fun if Dick-as-Batman had gotten a little too acrobatic with his fighting, and if this had been the thing to tip off Damian and Kate that he wasn’t the “real” Batman. Instead, they just know when they see him. The dialogue here is a bit more fun than normal too, since Batman isn’t around glooming up the place, and that’s a nice change, but it doesn’t reach the level of being truly special.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman vs. Robin (2015)

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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. 

In this follow-up to Son of Batman, the titular Batman and son butt heads over (sigh) the use of deadly force. It’s more complicated than that this time around, luckily, but that’s once again the dead horse we’re beating, still. It was hard to get my enthusiasm up for this one, since it not only features Damian, whom I’m mostly apathetic about, but also introduces the Court of Owls, a Gotham secret society introduced shortly after I stopped reading comics and which I don’t find particularly interesting. This ended up being a bit more interesting than expected, though, and helped me push through. 

The film opens with Batman (Jason O’Mara) following Robin/Damian (Stuart Allen) to the hideout of the evil Dollmaker (Weird Al(!)), where the latter has traced a series of kidnappings. The ten-year-old Boy Wonder has impulsively gone ahead and forced Batman to follow him instead of going together. By the time he catches up, he starts freeing the children while his son and sidekick pursues Dollmaker, leaving an opportunity for the mysterious Talon (Jeremy Sisto) to introduce himself (mysteriously, of course), give Damian a little speech about how murder is sometimes necessary, and then kill Dollmaker, leaving the scene so that it appears Damian did it. Bruce is quick to believe that this is the case, even if Alfred (David McCallum) and Dick/Nightwing (Sean Maher) are more willing to believe the boy. Alfred, rather irresponsibly, fiddles with the home security system to allow Robin the chance to go roaming about the city at night—remember, trained assassin or not, he is ten—which allows Talon to continue to try and lure the kid to the dark side. For his part, Bruce isn’t doing such a hot job at being a father, given that he hasn’t even mentioned Damian to the woman that he’s currently dating, Samantha (Grey DeLisle), let alone introduced them, and he’s having a hard time adjusting to suddenly being a father. Luckily, this leads easily into flashbacks to his own childhood, including his hearing about a secret society known as “the Court of Owls” that rule Gotham from the shadows, and his father’s gentle bedtime promises that there was no such thing. In the present, it’s clear that they do, and that they’re pulling some strings; in fact, their Grandmaster is unwittingly working away at him from two angles, as the Court is attempting to flush out Batman before he can end their criminal activities and court (no pun intended) Bruce Wayne into joining their ranks after his father had rejected them decades before. Talon is their enforcer, and his loyalty is based upon their promise to make him into one of their immortal soldiers (with the caveat that they haven’t really perfected the process, and it seems to always be a little bit of a failure). 

The fight scenes in this one are pretty good, which is always true, but there’s a little more variety in this outing. There’s sparring earlier on between Damian and other characters, and it’s fine and all, but there’s a clear difference in the body language of the characters later in the film when Damian has gone rogue. In his first fight with Batman, it’s clear that Bruce is just trying to let his son tire himself out with his spin kicks and acrobatics so that he doesn’t actually have to punch his child in the face, but eventually realizes he’s going to have to, and that was sufficiently dynamic visually that it’s worth noting upon. The big invasion of Wayne Manor by the Court’s “Owls” made for a satisfactory climactic set piece, albeit I’m very bored with Batmechs, I can tell you that much. What really makes this one stand out is Bruce getting dosed with hallucinogenic gas; he basically has a bad acid trip in which he foresees Damian becoming a killer, wearing the cape and cowl, and that makes him want to be a better father. In his hallucination, the child version of himself/Damian (their similarity to one another having previously been underscored by using the same character model with different eye colors in the earlier film is carried over into this one) tells him that, in his grief, he had allowed himself to become little better than the “dark forces” that killed his parents, and that his unwillingness to listen to his son would cause Damian to become something even worse. 

These movies are rarely this psychologically mature or complex, so I like that what drives the emotional story for the two main adult characters here, Talon and Bruce, is what each of them is projecting about themselves onto Damian. You know Batman’s backstory, and Talon’s is a kind of dark mirror of both Bruce’s and Damian’s. An orphan like Bruce, Talon was taken in by a thief who taught him how the finer points of burglary in a kind of criminal reflection of Bruce’s mentorship of Dick and Damian, but Talon was mercilessly beaten for his failures. This led to him becoming a vigilante as an adult as well, but under the guidance of the Court of Owls, his activity always has the flavor of violent vengeance, while Bruce (ostensibly) values justice over revenge. Bruce hallucinates Damian as a mass-murderer on an unimaginable scale because he fears this darkness in himself. Talon, for his part, sees a great deal of himself in Damian, and perhaps also sees the possibility of making up for what was done to him, turning the boy into a killer like himself but also making sure that the generational abusive trauma stops with him, as twisted as that might be. When it becomes the best option for the Court’s end goals to kill Damian, Talon ultimately refuses, looking into the boy’s face and seeing his own, just as Bruce had, and being unwilling to continue the cycle of violence, revolting against the Court instead. The ultimate conflict comes down to two different men projecting their traumas onto a little boy, and what they do when that trigger is brushed. It’s thoughtful, and elevates this one a little bit over some others in this franchise. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — War (2014)

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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. 

Right off the bat, this one starts out a lot stronger than its predecessor, although its differences from it only further ask the question of why Flashpoint Paradox was made in the first place. The art design is miles better, with the character models looking much more slick and complete, and it has a pretty strong opening. Right off the bat (no pun intended), we are introduced to Green Lantern (Justin Kirk) as he pursues an apparent kidnapper that has been construed with the supposed Batman, who most believe to be an urban legend. Rescuing the kidnapping victim from her would-be captor, he unmasks what turns out to be some kind of alien monster, only to be joined by the real Batman (Jason O’Mara). The scene counterbalances exposition with some fun new character work as these two meet for the first time, showcasing Hal’s brashness and sarcasm while allowing him to demonstrate his powers and explain their function and form to Batman, who in turn demonstrates his own newly-playful mystique and the deftness that allows him to play in the same league (pun intended this time) as people with superpowers, when he manages to lift the Green Lantern ring without Hal’s knowledge. 

Elsewhere, we get our character introductions to others, some of which are intertwined. Young Billy Batson (Zach Callison) sneaks into a football game to see his hero, Vic Stone (Shemar Moore), ending up sitting in the seat reserved for Stone’s scientist father, Silas (Rocky Carroll). Dr. Stone, as usual, is too preoccupied with his work to take any interest in his son’s athletic achievements; his most recent object of obsession is a seemingly alien device that was delivered to him by the Flash (Christopher Gorham) sometime before the movie began. The device is identical to the one that Batman and Green Lantern were able to obtain from the alien that they pursued in the film’s opening, and which they have taken to Metropolis in order to get more information from the only other alien they know of, Superman (Alan Tudyk). Meanwhile, unconnected to anyone else, Wonder Woman (Michelle Monaghan) finds herself in Washington en route to meet the U.S. President when her motorcade encounters protesters; she initially offers to lend her support in taking action against the person that they are chanting about, only to discover they are carrying an effigy of her. Using her lasso, she compels the leader of the protest to explain why he really hates her, and he is forced to admit that he dresses up as her in lingerie to make himself feel powerful. After she tries some ice cream, she learns that the President will not be able to see her. 

This seems as good a time as any to point out that this film has a pretty decent sense of humor, and I appreciated that. Most of the time, when these movies have succeeded, it’s been because of the depth of their dramatic elements, and rarely because they were able to make me laugh. It’s interesting that this was the first real attempt by the DC animation division to create an MCU-style interconnected franchise and came out a few years prior to the 2017 cut of Justice League, and it shares some plot elements with that one – notably, that the villain is fromApokalips, uses Parademons as foot soldiers and Mother Boxes for his plans, and that we see Victor Stone turn into Cyborg over the course of the film as fallout from said Mother Box. Also like that film, it’s also attempting to echo some of that MCU-style jokey dialogue, but to much better effect than the live action adaptation. Not all the jokes land, and the ones that really don’t are mostly references to contemporary pop culture, like Green Lantern initially japing/probing to see if Batman is a vampire by referencing the in-universe product from which True Blood took its title. There are even references to TMZ and World of Warcraft, with the latter invoked in order to tease Darkseid, the film’s villain, for his silly name. 

What does work are the interpersonal touches. Batman and GL get off on the wrong foot at the beginning of the movie, and their sniping at each other as they work together usually features the latter moaning about having to deal with the former. Later, when they are joined by Flash, GL immediately tries to ingratiate himself with the speedster, attempting to do an awkward series of secret handshake segments that Flash could not give less of a shit about. When Flash then fanboys upon learning that Batman is real, Lantern tries to play off that the guy is a tool, only for Batman to recognize Flash as a peer, telling him that he does “tight, efficient work” and that shaking his hand, much to GL’s consternation. It’s not groundbreaking intercharacter work, but it is fun. Cyborg’s puzzlement over why the Shazam (Sean Astin) is so interested in partnering with him, in conjunction with Shazam’s apparently adult form fawning over his child alter ego’s hero, also makes for a nice dynamic. There’s also a fair amount of decent physical comedy as well, with one particular standout being the sequence in which an overzealous Lantern is backhanded by an unimpressed Darkseid, then is immediately jumped by a couple of Parademons, who just start kicking him like he went down in a schoolyard fight. 

And now for a few one-off notes that I took while watching this one. It’s funny to think of this one as being considered to be a direct continuation of Flashpoint Paradox, taking place in the new timeline created by all the tiny ripple effects left over after Barry tried to fix the timeline in that one. For one thing, Barack Obama was definitively the POTUS in the timeline where Atlantis and the Amazons were at war, with the implication he was president before Flash went back in time, but in this new timeline, he’s replaced by a generic white prez. It’s also funny to me that Diana gets so bored of waiting to meet him that she decides to just bail and get ice cream, given the current president’s fondness for it (he loves it almost as much as genocide and rolling over to show the GOP his soft underbelly). I also really enjoyed the way that Superman and Batman first meet here, with their fight being about as one-sided as you’d expect before the latter stops his god-tier opponent by simply whispering “Clark,” showing immediately that he’s not to be trifled with. 

Overall, I enjoyed this one a lot more than I was expecting to. There are parts of it that are so familiar that I can’t help but wonder if I already saw this one or just consumed the comic it adapts or the movie with which it shares so many narrative elements. I can say that I don’t love that the threat that they team up to defeat is Darkseid. I know that’s an artifact of Justice League: Origin, the comic on which this is based, but hitting the ground running with Darkseid as your primary villain still doesn’t quite sit right with me. That’s the kind of thing that you should build up to. Still, this one was actually quite a lot of fun, which was a nice surprise after Flashpoint Paradox. I’m hoping the quality holds.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond