Troy Baker

The Not-So-New 52: Batman and Superman – Battle of the Super Sons (2022)

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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.

Of all of the films on this list, this was the one I was least looking forward to. The few clips that I saw prior to my screening did not endear me to its 3D animation style, and it seemed squarely aimed at a child audience based on the premise alone. What this ended up being was much better than I expected, even if its PG-13 rating is a little baffling. 

Jonathan Kent (Jack Dylan Grazer) is about to turn twelve, and is old enough to start to resent the frequent absences of his journalist father, Clark (Travis Willingham), despite frequent lectures from his mother Lois (Laura Bailey) about the importance of the fourth estate. When dear old dad misses Jonathan’s baseball game on his birthday, the boy broods in his room and runs from his father when he does come home, taking off into a cornfield before his emotional stress gets the better of him and he manifests heat vision. Hiding in the barn afterward, his father reveals to him for the first time that he’s not always off chasing stories, but averting tsunamis and stopping falling space debris, because pops is Superman. Jonathan is delighted at this news (despite, like many children, having a preference for the “cooler” Batman). After a touching father-and-son flight around the world in the vein of Aladdin’s “A Whole New World” musical sequence, the two go to Gotham, where Superman introduces his son to Batman (Troy Baker) and the latter’s own son, Damian/Robin (Jack Griffo). There’s immediate friction between the elitist Damian and “farm boy” Jonathan, and their conflict belies Damian’s own insecurities, specifically that the Teen Titans don’t want him because of his tendencies toward both violence and lone-wolfism, rejecting him from the team. When an interstellar invading force assimilates huge swathes of the earth’s population, including the Justice League and the Titans, it’s up to the boys to put aside their differences and save both their dads and the world. 

Strangely, I had an easier time adjusting to the animation style here than I have in the “Tomorrowverse” movies, perhaps because these character models don’t constantly call to mind Adult Swim shows of a bygone era. It’s certainly not up to something like Pixar’s output, but it’s pretty decent, if occasionally wonky. I don’t think we ever see anyone close the front door of the Kent farmhouse, as characters often walk in and leave the door wide open while they have a conversation until the scene ends, so it really does seem like everyone here was raised in the proverbial barn. There are even scenes that were rather impressive, most notably the scene in which Green Arrow, bow cocked, searches the JL’s “Watchtower” satellite for a potential invader, as there’s a lot of fun rotation around the character and the movement of both model and lighting was effectively moody. There are also several scenes of characters walking out of dark shadows to reveal that they’ve been taken over by Starro spores that reminded me of one of my all-time favorite comfort Halloween watches, The Faculty, and that always gets points with me. 

Characterwise, I appreciated that this film had one of the most infuriatingly unlikeable versions of Damian Wayne to date, and that his character arc over the course of this one moves him to a more sympathetic place, which was impressive. When we first meet him, he’s snide and condescending while Bruce stands by embarrassed, apologizing for the fact that his spawn is a bratty little edgelord. He even kicks Jonathan over the edge of one of the many non-OSHA-compliant platforms in the Batcave as a “test” to see if he can get the other boy’s flight power to activate in a traumatic situation (it does not work, and Jonathan is almost smashed to death on stalacmites). His decision to head straight to Jonathan’s school and recruit him to his “save the dads” mission is pragmatic, but also speaks to his desire to prove that he can be a team player. For his part, Jonathan himself is in a meeting with the principal following an altercation with a bully named Melvin; the school administrator tells Jonathan that Melvin is troubled and that if Jonathan can extend the other boy a little grace and look past his harsh exterior, people like Melvin can be the most loyal friend one can ask for. This doesn’t really seem to be true in the case of Melvin (that kid’s a little asshole), but it does echo through his scenes with Damian, as Jonathan is able to win him over through his own clever thinking and spirit of determination. It’s not the most nuanced or original storytelling, but it’s not talking down to its audience. 

Speaking of which, I’m not really sure who this film is supposed to be for. I mentioned that PG-13 rating above, and for most of the runtime, I was hard-pressed to think of why that might be the case. Not every movie that’s about children is for children, obviously. No child should see Come and See or Graveyard of the Fireflies before they’re old enough to process what they’re seeing. This, however, definitely has the air of being made for a younger audience than these movies are normally suited for. In fact, the moment that a character said “damn,” I was a little shocked, as Super Sons had theretofore been so … family-friendly? The plot point about young Jonathan feeling ignored by his father because he missed the kid’s baseball game is a cliche lifted straight out of Hook, and both Damian and Jonathan’s playground insults are feeble in a way that couldn’t possibly interest an adult audience but might, perhaps, pass muster with a child. I found myself surprisingly touched by all the time that Clark and Jonathan spend together in Act I, but it’s not sophisticated, adult stuff; it’s for kids. After the midpoint, however, things start to get a little more violent, as if the film was lulling you into a false sense of security before moving on to Starro’s little seastar-with-an-eye things horribly emerging from characters’ mouths and, in the finale, all of those eyes bursting bloodily when the hive mind is defeated. I’m not sure what to make of this, honestly, since it takes what is clearly a PG family movie into something that’s more in line with what the standard audience of these movies would expect, but I find it hard to imagine them not being bored with the film’s more squeaky-clean daycare-safe first half. Ultimately, it’s pretty decent, if tonally uneven, and for someone who normally rolls his eyes at stories about fathers and sons, I found this story inoffensive and occasionally tender. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – The Long Halloween Pts. 1 & 2 (2021)

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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.

When I watched Matt Reeves’s The Batman a couple of years ago, one of the things that struck me about it was how much more I thought I would have enjoyed it as a standard crime movie without all the baggage of being attached to a huge intellectual property. Although that comes with making a film that’s all but guaranteed to make a profit (note: I started composing this review before the underwhelming opening of Folie à Deux), it’s also ultimately pretty limiting in how creative you can be before you start alienating that core audience by deviating “too much” from the source material. When it comes to The Long Halloween, I read the source material some fifteen years ago, but there were elements of the Robert Pattinson movie that seemed familiar, and now having had my memory refreshed by the animated adaptation of that comic, it’s clear that the live action movie took major plot inspiration from it. Strange that two such similar projects/products were in production at the same time and released within such proximity, with this week’s double feature having been released in 2021, followed closely by The Batman in 2022. Given that this was split into two roughly 85-minute halves, they add up to almost the same length (2 hours 56 minutes for the Reeves film, 2 hours 52 minutes for The Long Halloween) as well, which makes the comparison between the two almost a requirement. Since this is also a special double feature “issue,” I also did something a little special this week and watched this movie with a couple of friends, instead of late at night, alone and ashamed in the dark, so we’ll have some additional commentary tonight. 

A special note! This film is based on a highly regarded comic book from the 1990s, and which essentially continued the story from the 1987 miniseries Batman: Year One, which was previously adapted to an animated film. This film is not a sequel to that one. It is, however, placed in the “Tomorrowverse” series that began with Man of Tomorrow. This means that this one has that same thick-line art style as that film, which I mostly managed to get used to over the course of almost three hours, but every time Jim Gordon was on screen all I could think about was Rusty Venture. This is neither derogatory or a compliment, just an observation. 

Ok, it’s a little derogatory. 

It’s early in the career of the Batman (Jensen Ackles). Bruce Wayne is pressured by Gotham City mob boss Carmine Falcone (Titus Welliver) to help him launder his money, leading him to ally himself with new, seemingly incorruptible Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent (Josh Duhamel) and Commissioner Jim Gordon (Billy Burke) – not as Wayne, of course, but as Batman. When he breaks into the Falcone penthouse to search for evidence, he encounters Catwoman (Naya Rivera), who is doing the same thing; they chase each other around doing parkour and other such foreplay. She leads him to a warehouse where cash is waiting to be laundered, and Batman, Gordon, and Dent agree to destroy it in order to strike a crippling blow to Falcone’s machine. Falcone’s waging a war on two fronts, as people close to him begin to drop like flies at the hands of a serial killer that the press nicknames “Holiday,” as each of the victims is slain on a holiday, beginning with Halloween. The killer’s m.o. is simple: a single gunshot, silenced by the nipple of a baby bottle. As the year of the titular “long Halloween” plays out, Arkham Asylum lives up to its reputation, as several of the old rogues gallery escape from their confinement there, including Scarecrow, Poison Ivy (Katee Sackhoff!), and, as you would expect, the Joker (Troy Baker). At the heart of it all, however, remains the question: who is Holiday? 

During the break between the first and second parts of this story, one of my viewing companions asked me how this one compared to the others that I have watched so far. I explained my tier system and said that, at least at that point, The Long Halloween was above average. I genuinely had no idea who the killer would turn out to be, I was engaged with the mystery, and I appreciated the film’s attempts to be more of a gangster movie than a comic book one, even if all of the goodwill it had in that arena required that it lift lines directly from The Godfather. And, hey, the last scene of that first one involved a man being shot overboard in Gotham Harbor and then getting atomized by a yacht’s giant subsurface turbines. You don’t see that every day! There are a few seemingly irrelevant scenes early in the film that featured Solomon Grundy, and I asked my not-well-versed-in-comics viewing companion if any of those scenes meant anything to her or if she even understood them, and she assured me that they did not. It’s rare to be able to get that kind of feedback from someone with neither much interest in these films in general or knowledge about all the things that get stuffed in here. This illustrated one of the issues that I have with these movies, which is that they aren’t really accessible to someone who isn’t already at least somewhat steeped in the fiction that this conglomerate has been producing for nearly a century. On the other hand, it’s not really clear who would be interested in these things other than those people. 

For what it’s worth, I appreciated that the film had a consistent theme of duality throughout. That’s patently obvious in the character of Two-Face, but one of the things that I liked here was that it was unclear from the outset whether Bruce and Selena know about the other’s nocturnal activities. My interpretation of the narrative is that neither one of them knows, but that Selena figures it out first and it takes Bruce a bit longer. When the two of them break up (as Selena and Bruce), Bruce says something along the lines of “We’re just two different people,” which I appreciated as a little bit of clever dialogue since both of them do, in fact, literally have two different personae. Where this is least interesting is in Bruce’s struggle between working in the darkness versus the light, and I have to be honest—I could not make myself care about this at this point. There was this podcast about a decade ago called The Worst Idea of All Time, wherein two NZ comedians watched the same (bad) movie every week for a year and did 52 episodes about it. I had friends who were fans, and at the time I thought I would be tough enough to do that with certain movies. Now, having seen Batman contend with his moral code for the umpteenth time, I can say that those men were brave. It’s beginning to feel purgatorial, frankly. 

That’s not this movie’s fault, however, and I would praise it for having a mystery that I found pretty compelling, and when all of the pieces fell into place, the resolution scratched that same part of my brain that gets pleasure from Murder She Wrote and Columbo. The clues really were there all along, and although I got to the solution before the characters did, it was only by a matter of minutes. That having been said, my viewing companions were not as entertained or engaged by it as I was. Their notes, collectively, identified that the mystery was not that interesting, that Batman seemed kind of dumb, and that the art style makes Jim Gordon look too much like Dr. Venture (oh, wait, that last one is me again). Neutral comments included that “the art style was easy to get used to,” and that it was derivative, but that this could be because it inspired some storytelling elements that are now commonplace or otherwise old hat. We were all in agreement that the film did not, perhaps, need to be this long. The film does not do itself any favors by featuring panels from the comic in its opening credits sequence—artwork which is moody, shadowed, and full of rich character detail—which makes the film’s animation look plain and dulled in comparison. If you want to experience this story, that’s the preferable option. This one makes a case for its existence and makes for a fairly interesting watch, though. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond