Michael's Movie Grade: B
A fast paced and fun animated action movie.
This movie certainly shines its best during the flash back scenes. These scenes are excellent. They not only give us a real insight into who the characters are, but are smartly written and a lot of fun to watch. Watching these characters interacting with each other is a delight and it especially shines in these scenes. Things like how they all react to the challenge of breaking the rock and them trying to figure out what is behind the door tell us all we need to know about these characters in a short time frame. This is important because much of the run time is taken up with action scenes and these scenes would not mean a thing if we never got to know who these characters are. Even in the present day (okay this 2021 movie takes place in the 1970's but you know what I mean), the interactions between our protagonists is really entertaining if all to brief. I love how though they haven't seen each other in a long time they still know each other inside and out because of how much they shared in past experiences (that is really clever and good writing). The action scenes themselves are a lot of fun. They are very much in the style of 1970's martial arts films and capture everything that made those movies so much fun while putting them much more over the top in the most fun way possible.
This film certainly does have a few problems though. The villain is rather bland and one wishes that the film spent more time setting up the villain among its many actions scenes. Speaking about villains when this film early on shows one of the villains torturing a prostitute, the scene seems to be there for no reason but to throw a little sex into the movie and show off their fancy R rating. There is also the fact that much of the dialogue (especially in the movie's climax) is completely cliché and predictable.
All in all this may not be one of the best DC animated movies, but it is still a heck of a lot of fun.
-Michael J. Ruhland
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