Rent Justice League: Warworld (2023)

Justice League: Warworld review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

I must confess that part of me was looking forward to a Justice League Warworld movie. I’d been reading the most recent run of Action Comics centered around Superman and others heading to Warworld to fight the oppressive Mongul and combat the fascist hellscape he had crafted for his own planet. That comic book arc was solid, albeit it has a dreary prologue to get there. Sadly, this is not what Warworld ended up being in animated form.

This film seems to play somewhere between an anthology and the standard Justice League plot of stopping an intergalactic threat. The film starts with three separate stories of Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman being placed in otherworld scenarios with no previous memory of how they got there. Wonder Woman occupies the Old West, where she uses her superpowers to wage battle with the ruthless gang leader, Jonah Hex, and favors the determination and knowledge of the cunning Batlash. Batman resides in a fantasy realm where he’s forced to battle with prehistoric beasts and deadly wizards. Superman is a detective who finds himself in a Twilight Zone-style 1950s case of an alien among humans. These stories all spin their gears decently, but they never really engage all that much for their brief running times.

Then, the tail-end of the film reveals that all three characters were being hypnotized and mind-wiped for Mongul’s Warworld experiments. They regain their memories quickly and become the Justice League to stop Mongul, with a little help from the expert Martian, J'onzz, and the anti-hero bounty hunter, Lobo. They all join forces to save the day and blow up Warworld, complete with a less exciting tease of a deus-ex machina ending meant to set up a future Crisis on Infinite Earths movie (I think).

I’ve been trying to root for DC’s Tomorrowverse era of connected animated films, but Warworld makes it hard to care about this saga, even for someone who has been a long-time DC Comics fan and appreciates the style and freedom of this connected animated universe. Considering that Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are all distant in their separate stories, their chemistry in the actual Warworld section feels lacking, and their ultimate destruction of Mongul’s sinister plans feels bland. The asides of the elsewhere stories are way too short that any greater allegory is cut off too soon. For example, Superman’s detective story is ripe for the character coming to understand how different he is from humanity and the discrimination he’d face as such. Unfortunately, this story gets cut off right as J'onzz comes in to flip the script. Mongul and his ultimate plan of cloning and harvesting powers for a doomsday device is far too routine.

Warworld feels less like a solid addition to the DC Comics animated movie universe and more like a mess of an attempt to bring Warworld into a live-action movie. It’s sloppy, all over the place, and the few moments of brutal, R-rated violence do little to offset the aimless nature of the story that searches around for something more and turns up empty. The film more or less acts like a bridge and pillar for the next big event in this cinematic universe. But based on how much time is wasted on elsewhere stories and predictable usage of characters, it’s doubtful you’ll need to watch this entry to see where this animated movie universe goes next.