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 don’t talk about video games around here very often. Although our bread and butter is film talk, obviously, we occasionally diverge and talk about books, music, and Star Trek. I enjoy video games, although I wouldn’t consider myself much of a gamer. When I enjoy something, I usually do nothing but play that game to completion (or close enough to completion that I’m satisfied) and then might not pick up a controller again for months, and even over a year at certain points in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever even brought it up over on the podcast, although if you go back through the archives and are curious as to why I didn’t write a single review in September of last year, the solution to that mystery is that I had just gotten Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I’m the kind of person who thinks that the newest system is always too expensive, and normally wait until the next generation is out before I even consider purchasing one. The XBox 360 released for Christmas 2004, but I didn’t buy one until I used my tax return to do so in February of 2008. I used nothing but that as my entire entertainment center for over a decade. The PS4 was released in 2013 and the PS5 in 2020, and I upgraded to the PS4 on Black Friday 2019, when the prices were already starting to drop and there was additional savings. But what really prompted me to upgrade was the release of two games that had me salivating: Spider-Man and Injustice 2. The latter of these was a sequel to a game that I had played on my 360, and although I had little interest in the narrative (such as it was; this is a one-to-two player 1v1 fighter of the Mortal Kombat mold after all), but I was intrigued about getting to play as Supergirl, my love for whom is well documented in these reviews. The narrative of the first game is simple; a furious Superman, enraged at having been tricked into killing a pregnant Lois by Joker, forgoes due process and just straight up kills the murderous clown. This ends up splitting various heroes down ethical lines as Superman slides further and further down the slippery moral slope, ending with him setting up a regime. When you play the storyline (rather than just the arena), you mostly play as members of the rebellion against this despot. 

It’s not the most original storyline. We’re up to our necks in “What if Superman, but evil?” at this point, and if you’re thinking that maybe this was before that was such a tired idea, then you’re sort of right. The game came out in 2013, while this film came out in 2021, at a point in time in which the world already had two seasons of The Boys. In 2013, this was fine — not just because it hadn’t been done to death yet, but also because it wasn’t supposed to be a movie, it was just supposed to be the bare skeleton upon which a fighting game was very thinly predicated. But piggies love slop (and I’m not excluding myself here) so of course the game got a prequel comic, and the prequel comic got an animated adaptation, and here we are. I never read that comic (and you can’t make me), but there were apparently enough changes that the film has a disputed reputation. For what its worth, this is one of the most fan-fictiony things that I have ever seen with a full animation budget, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. This movie is the equivalent of watching a child smash action figures into one another and weld together different half-remembered things that they know about characters into a messy narrative, except it’s also sadistic in a way that seems designed to appeal to someone who craves more adult media but can’t fathom going out of their DC comfort zone. 

The film opens on Clark (Justin Hartley) and Lois (Laura Bailey) in bed together, when Clark is awakened because he hears an extra heartbeat, revealing that Lois is pregnant. She goes off to work while Clark gets his Superman on and meets with Batman (Anson Mount), who deduces the good news even before his friend can reveal it. Unfortunately, the Joker (Kevin Pollak) is in Metropolis, where he murders Jimmy Olsen and kidnaps Lois. The whole league is brought in to try and find her before something bad can happen, and they work together to find that Joker and Harley Quinn (Gillian Jacobs) have stolen a submarine and that one of the nuclear warheads is missing. Superman brings the sub back to shore and boards it, and inhales some Scarecrow gas that has been laced with kryptonite, then attacks what he believes to be Doomsday and takes the monster into space, only to discover upon exiting the atmosphere that he’s dragged his lover and their child into space, where they both die. Worse still, a timer has been surgically grafted onto Lois’s heart, so that when it stops, the missing nuke detonates in Metropolis, atomizing the city. While Green Arrow (Reid Scott) takes Harley into what amounts to protective custody, Superman tracks down Batman and the Joker to Arkham, where he—over Batman’s protests—extrajudicially murders Joker. This sets the two heroes at odds with one another, as Superman starts down the slippery slope with Wonder Woman (Janet Varney), Cyborg (Brandon Michael Hall), Bruce’s own son Damian/Robin (Zach Callison), and others joining his regime, while Batman, Arrow, Catwoman, Dick/Nightwing, and others form a “rebellion” against Superman’s overreach. This starts small, with enforced peacekeeping in the Middle East through invasion and deconstruction of the power structures of fictional countries like Bialya and Qurac, but gets out of hand when he murders an entire warehouse full of young ravers because of their idolization of Joker as a figurehead against Superman’s fascism. From here, it’s hero versus hero, yawn, etc.

You know that thing that people love to mock about MCU movies where a character says, “Well, that just happened,” even though no one has ever uttered that line in any of those? In this movie, someone actually says it, and I couldn’t believe just how creatively bankrupt the film already was at that point, a mere fifteen minutes in. It doesn’t bode well for the film overall, and is oddly also a part of the only thing in the movie that gave me any joy, which was the interaction between Arrow and Harley. He’s a very self-serious man, and their playful antipathy (complete with periodic gassings of one another) is some of the only levity that this gritty film musters. I’ve loved Jacobs since Community and she’s an inspired choice for Harley here, and she’s clearly having a lot of fun with it. Their rapport is fun, especially when she manages to crack through Arrow’s resistance on certain things (notably, she criticizes him for naming his secret HQ the “Arrowcave,” noting that “Batcave” makes sense as bats live in caves, she recommends the “Quiver,” which he adopts fairly quickly as he realizes that she has a point). That’s about all that there is to enjoy here, however, as the rest of the film alternates between being utterly dour, repetitive in its action sequences, and occasionally just straight up fanservice of the kind a child playing with toys would enjoy. What if Damian killed Nightwing? But, but what if when that happened Dick became, like, a version of Deadman called Deadwing (no, really)? It’s best enjoyed if you have the mind of a child, but isn’t really appropriate for children, which means it’s best suited exactly for the kind of manchildren that, to its credit, it’s clearly made for. That’s not a recipe for a good movie, though, and it shows in the final product. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond