Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Written by Wehrmacht on December 27, 2020

Heroes are only as good as their villains. Nothing sums up the disappointment of WW84 more than this.

Maxwell Lord & Barbara Minerva are two of the most dangerously dark psyches in DC lore, both fond of extremely nasty, deliberately sociopathic behavior.

Whoever it was pretending to be them in WW84, it wasn't those two from the comics.

We had some namby-pamby twerp called "Max Lord" who was just a misguided fool trying to fill that emptiness in his pathetic life with a magic dream. Yawn.

Also, some good-hearted ditz called "Barbara Minerva" basically became inadvertent collateral damage whilst Lord's dopey plan panned out. Admittedly, that's vaguely similar to one of Cheetah's later origin stories, but it completely discounts her propensity for choosing the pure evil path.

It could have been fun watching a proper mind-controlling Lord and a proper soul-possessing Cheetah fight over the "ownership" of some red shirt. Alas, no.

What an absolute WASTE of two A-grade narrative heavyweights! But then, that's the problem.

You simply could NOT use characters like Lord & Cheetah appropriately in a movie targeted towards a family audience, and it's obvious that "make this family friendly" was plastered all over the script in red sharpie.

Nothing's likely to change for the third WW installment, where, in keeping with the cinematic PG-downgrade of supervillains, Circe is portrayed as a lonely kid's party magician who gets angry when her balloons get popped, so she turns everyone into pet unicorns.