Batman/Superman Public Enemies

Recently I’ve decided to watch some of the direct to DVD movies that DC Comics has been putting out. I watched “Justice League: The New Frontier” and enjoyed it. So I figured I’d try out “Superman/Batman: Public Enemies.”

Let’s say I was very underwhelmed by this movie. The first hurdle I had to get over, and this one was tough, was the character designs. Everyone looked like they were made out of balloon animals. Screw the kryptonite, all Lex Luthor needed was a needle to poke Superman with. It seemed like every character’s muscles looked like tubes of brightly colored rubber. Power Girl’s design was especially bad. She reminded me of some kind of creepy rubber action figure that stares at you weird.

The plot wasn’t impressive at all. They had two storylines going on at the same time, which isn’t a problem if there is enough time to develop them. Unfortunately the running time was only 67 minutes, so instead of maybe one really well hashed out story, we got two subpar stories.

There were a few good points. The pointless battle between our protagonists and a small army of DC’s mostly popular and powerful villains was awesome, and well animated despite feeling very shoved into the movie. Well, to me that was the movie, and the stuff around that scene was the stuff that was shoved in. That part did make the rest of this subpar movie worth watching.

The voice cast is what makes me really sad about this movie. They had Kevin Conroy, Tim Daily, and Clancy Brown, three actors who I will forever associate with their DC characters, reprising these roles in such a sad attempt at a movie. I really wished that if they were going to get this trio back they would have made a better attempt at the script so that they would have had something better to work with.

Then there’s Levar “Geordi ‘Reading Rainbow’ La Forge” Burton to voice Black Lightening for ONE FRIGGIN’ LINE! That was it! The character was on screen for at least 10-15 minutes. I wasn’t expecting a speech on “How only you can save the Planet”, but more than one line of dialogue!

All in all, I’m not very impressed so far with the DC DVD movies, but I’m not going to give up just yet!”Justice League: The New Frontier” was pretty darn entertaining.  I’m going to go through 3 more of them this week, starting with “Crisis on Two Earths”, then “Wonder Woman” and finish it up with “Green Lantern: First Flight”.