For a Wonder Woman movie there isn't a lot of Wonder Woman in Wonder Woman 1984, at least not in the first half which is a bit of a jumbled mess. After a rousing opening -- which winds up not amounting to much -- set in her youth back on her home planet, the film becomes the closest thing to a Joel Schumacher style superhero film I've seen in years.
The always charming Gal Gadot, who got to have fun playing a fish out of water in the first film, is largely a bland, straight woman here. Kristen Wiig is basically doing a variation on Michelle Pfeiffer's performance in Batman Returns, but not as effective and Pedro Pascal gives a very campy, sweaty performance which feels like it's in an entirely different movie, and is too similar to a young Donald Trump aesthetically to not make that comparison.
The film's conceit -- that it's set in 1984 is overplayed, as most of these kind of period films are -- and the candy colored cuteness reaches its breaking point during an extended montage where Chris Pine (inexplicably, and I mean inexplicably brought back from the dead as Wonder Woman's long lost love interest) tries on a bevy of stereotypical 80s outfits. Pine is a likable actor, and he commits to playing his WWI-era character's amazement at the future, but he's just one detour too many in this overstuffed movie -- that looks amazing but is maybe one of the sillier superhero movies I've ever seen.
By this point, there has been one all-to-brief Wonder Woman action scene -- and that would be fine if the decidedly ludicrous plot had been more engaging or more comprehensible, or if the terrific cast had the opportunity to play people instead of types.
Wiig in particular is a disappointment here. She is given a lot of screen-time not the space to inject much of her own comic rhythms into her performance. We've seen this kind of nerd-to-supervillain transformation many times before (Jim Carrey in Batman Forever, Jamie Foxx in The Amazing Spider-Man 2), and she's just going through the paces. I can't buy her as a badass villain, no matter how much dark eyeshadow she wears. And there's a strange preoccupation with objectifying her undeniably well-toned body (including an emphasis on her ability to wear high heels and somehow just removing her glasses makes her sexy?) which is strange coming from a film co-written and directed by a woman.
Patty Jenkins, who is an incredible talent, seemed to have a real cohesive vision with the 2017 original that was sustained throughout even if the finale did give way to the same CGI overkill that overwhelms so many of the films in this genre.
Still, that movie felt special -- it felt like a real event. This movie feels disposable in the worst way -- as if it exists just to exist -- because the first Wonder Woman was such a big hit, there was an obligation to make another. And it's still better than most of the recent DC Comics output these days, which has become insufferably dreary and incoherent.
Wonder Woman 1984 isn't aggressively bad per se -- but it's far more of a bore than I expected it to be. It wants to be about big ideas and soaring emotions, but it fails on both counts.
It actually gave me more appreciation for the Marvel universe, not that all of those films are perfect, mind you, but they are almost all very plot and character driven and you have a sense of where they are going and why. In Wonder Woman 1984, individual moments work -- the opening, a dreamy flight in her invisible plane, an armored car chase in the desert -- but as a cinematic experience it's hard not to see it as a colossal disappointment.
Ironically enough, Warner Brothers' decision to pull the film from theaters and release it on streaming was viewed as a huge blow to the film industry, but I actually think they dodged a bullet here. I am sure this film would have opened big (in a covd-less world) because of the goodwill generated by the original, but I have a hard time thinking it would have been well-received or been the savior of the movie business.
In fact, the most I think of it, the more I kind of hate it.
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