Wow. That was actually terrible. Wonder Woman 84 isn't just a bad film, it's a fundamentally broken one. I'm trying to consolidate my thoughts but there are so many things wrong with this film, from the direction, acting, insanely stupid plot holes, the script as a whole, tone, SFX... It's hard to focus. Yeah, it's BAD.
It felt like they were going for the tone of a Richard Donner Superman movie at first
As dumb cheesy as the mall scene was the bumbling robbers and silly OTT set-pieces sort of lull you into thinking this is going to be a silly but ultimately fun romp but that is abandoned immediately anyway for this incoherent, dull, and dragging mess of a film that follows that tries a lot of things and fails miserably at literally all of them.
Gal Gadot can't act. You don't need an Oscar-winning performance to play a comic book hero but you need more than she can deliver here. Everything she says is stilted, tonally off, and carries no weight or emotion even when she's trying to lay it on thick. Even in the action scenes, she looks like she's doing a magazine shoot in every frame. I dunno, her whole performance leaves you feeling cold.
Kristen Wiig as Barbara is, we're led to believe, a nerdy loser that nobody pays attention to because she's a bit clumsy and wears glasses which apparently makes her ugly (LOL)
Wait until you take them off!
Just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to one-dimensional cookie-cutter stereotype characters.
Wiig can actually act (something that becomes even more starkly clear in every scene with Gadot) but nobody was saving this abomination and her character arc is as dumb as the rest of the film although at least not wanting to give up her new life and powers makes at least some sort of narrative sense which is more than can be said for anybody else motivations.
Pedro hams it up and it's obvious why he's a leading man, he's eminently watchable and looks like he's having some fun with Max although even he struggles by the time we hit the third act with his character just becoming so stupid and chaotic that it falls apart.
THE PLOT HOLES.
Jesus fucking Christ. HOW do these script treatments make it this far as to actually be filmed? There are so many nonsensical things in the plot that it boggles the mind.
Let's steal a modern fighter jet and somehow fly it from D.C to fucking EGYPT in one scene.
You used to fly props in 1914, Steve?
Don't worry you'll be fine with this fucking F-111.
As stupid as that is it probably doesn't even make the top 10 of egregious nonsensical shit we see in this film.
Aside from the obligatory "look a mall!" stuff there was nothing about the story that needed to be in 1984. They didn't even play any eighties music.
There was no point in it at all. We get Steve's fish out of water story AGAIN but like everything else, it doesn't work. Oh, look a train! Oh, look, fireworks!
Huh?
What the fuck was all that unnecessary weirdness with Steve inhabiting another random guy's body?
Like Wiig and Pedro, Pine can actually act but yeah you can only do so much with the state of this script.
The entire premise of the film being about wishing is something we've seen in plenty of films before but even in the bad ones, they have more fun with the concept than anything we get in this film. And that's the biggest issue overall. I can take some serious jank, some plot holes (although not this many), and some shaky acting if what I'm watching has some soul and actual fun spirit to it but this does not AT ALL.
It would be remiss not to talk about the cringe either. The first WW had quite a bit of it but this one takes it to a new fucking level. Like Hasselhoff in Baywatch saving homeless people levels.
Why is this film 2 and a half hours long?
Ugh, I've written too much already. It would take longer than this film's inflated runtime to go through everything wrong here and I don't have the energy.