Rent Injustice (2021)

Injustice (aka Injustice: Gods Among Us! The Movie) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Injustice, based more on the video games than the DC Comics counterpart, trots down a familiar trail of heroes going bad. This is not the first DC Comics animated film to feature Superman turning evil. It’s not even the best one, considering that Red Son exists. That being said, there are a few nuggets of interesting moral questioning about why Superman’s powers shouldn’t run so rampant or go unchecked in the name of justice. Well, at least until the third act.

The first two acts, however, are rather strong. We get a sense that nobody has plot armor in this dark tale of Superman finally being pushed over the edge. The film opens with him being the first to know that Lois Lane is pregnant. He’s ecstatic to make the leap from superhero into fatherhood but that’s a world he will get to experience. The Joker, having decided to go extra violent in his scheme, devises a plan that not only destroys an entire city but manipulates Superman into murdering Lois. This sends Superman down a dark path when he decides to brutally murder The Joker to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone ever again.

This is a revenge fantasy that many of the less morally engaged readers of Batman have often pondered. Why doesn’t Batman just kill The Joker? If he did, the clown criminal couldn’t escape and kill even more people with his fiendish plots. Of course, Batman knows the answer to why. It’s never just one you want to kill. There will always be more. It’s an aspect that was hammered home brilliantly in Under The Red Hood when Batman explained to Robin that lethal revenge will not solve anything. Superman, of course, doesn’t listen and a totalitarian state is well on its way to becoming a reality.

The film does well to showcase Superman’s bitter fears for wanting to create a more secure Earth but never endorse it as being the correct path. It starts with interfering in geopolitical wars and soon leads to full-scale surveillance of the planet, utilizing the evil methods of Ra’s Al Ghul and Amazo to make this dream of security a reality. Amid all this restructuring of Earth’s security, there’s a great scene where Superman speaks with Mister Terrific over chess about gun control. The slippery slope easily reveals itself during this scene, where it becomes all the more apparent that Superman’s desire for control will not end at guns and it will not end well.

There are also a lot of shocking moments in this story. Once Superman assumes greater control of the population with Terrific’s technology, he crashes a party of Joker-loving young rebels who deem Superman a fascist for murdering the Joker. Rather than reflect on their adoration for a villain, Superman simply murders everyone at the party, unwilling to confront the greater issue of reduced freedom. How can a world possibly stop such a threat?

Well, the film has an unfortunate answer. The ultimate resolve of this story is that the only person who can stop Superman is another Superman. And a handful of the Justice League accomplishes this by jumping into another dimension to find a Superman more capable of stopping the evil Superman. As if that weren’t complicated enough, there’s also a subplot of Dick Grayson dying and coming back from the dead as a spirit who tries to help stop this threat. There’s also the comic relief of Green Arrow and Harley Quinn which is both odd and feels as though it should be featured in another movie.

If Injustice had a better ending, it could’ve been one of the best DC Comics animated films for questioning morals and security. But all that potential feels washed into a lukewarm action picture by the finale, where the fast and loose logic of the comic confounds the greater themes. This is such a frustrating picture for all the potential it carries and how little is taken advantage of, doing little be more than a marketing product for the video game series of the same name.