I was looking forward to it. I really was. A major studio release, a blockbuster sent straight to our homes, and on Christmas Day, no less. I’m not a fan of DC Comics -- Marvel is far superior -- but under the circumstances, I’d take anything to distract or entertain. Unfortunately, “Wonder Woman 1984” does neither of those things.
WW84 hits the ground stumbling and never, not even briefly, gains its footing. It really is a terrible movie from start to finish.
There’s no way to talk about this horrible movie without giving away some of the plot and spoilers, so if that bothers you, you should stop reading. But I can tell you this: no words I will write can prepare you for how bad it is, so in that sense, there is no spoiling this movie. Whatever you picture, whatever you imagine it to be, it’s worse; much worse. In many ways, the best parts of the movie are just how stupid it gets.
Right from the open, WW84 is bad. The only way the opening sequence could have been longer is to play it in slow motion. The “lesson” in it about the truth is very “on the nose” with the rest of the movie, but the special effects in the opening race are just bad. I’m not sure they could be made good. The concept of the competition is so stupid that there might not be any way to save it.
Immediately after the flashback comes the 80s. One thing every movie about the 80s gets wrong is everything – everything is the stereotype of the time. Not everyone worse pastel colors, not every guy had a mustache. In this movie, pretty much every extra does. It’s like they were all sent over from “Caricature, INC.” It is distracting.
It’s also distracting when the opening “heist” results in one of the robbers dropping his gun in a mall that sets off a panic. It literally just falls to the ground, doesn’t even go off, yet people are screaming and running away like he’d opened fire with an Uzi.
In comes Wonder Woman, who’s there for reasons unknown, to save the day. The first thing you notice about this scene is how Wonder Woman has transformed into Spiderman. The Golden Lasso not only serves as a way to force people to tell the truth, but it’s now a web to swing from, from literally anything (as we find out later). It’s never explained, it just seems convenient.
The lasso’s new powers are just one of many things that seem to come into being because writing a script set in the universe they created in the first movie was too hard for what they wanted to do – when you find yourself stuck, just make it up.
Need Chris Pine in the movie, even though he died in the first one? Just make up a way. Need to fly to Egypt and back in what seems like a day for nothing really related to the plot? Just do it. No one will notice. The movie does whatever it wants without regard to story, plot or reality.
The “villain,” to the extent that there is one, never really explains their motivation. Just greed. The character played by Kristen Wiig is worse. Wiig plays the same character she plays in everything – the nervous loser. It gets old from the second she shows up on screen. For reasons too stupid to explain, she’s the muscle for the villain.
The whole thing, the “epic battle” that happens at the end of the movie is…a speech. I’m not kidding. That’s a spoiler, of sorts, but seeing how it gets to that point makes it, in a weird way, worthwhile.
Maybe I’m different. I enjoy bad movies, or I enjoy movies so bad they’re good. I have a DVD collection of movies that would embarrass a story to carry – Crossroads, From Justin to Kelly, Glitter, Gigli, etc. Wonder Woman 1984 is kind of like that. You laugh at it, not with it. You can’t ignore how bad it is – story, direction, costumes, performances – you can enjoy it just because of how bad those things are. No matter what, if you have HBO or you have HBO Max, it costs you nothing but time to watch it. With states being locked down again, lord knows we all have a lot of that.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter
