Deathstroke Knights & Dragons: The Movie

Animation was decent, plot was unoriginal with generic action/superhero cliches, runtime bloated with too much exposition and the characters were one-dimenional and predictable with no consistency in personality, motivation, powers or ability. Deathstroke is one of DCs coolest and most complex characters, yet they gave him a basic superhero revenge/redemption story.

Waste of a great character and as well as an R rating that adds nothing to the screenplay.

Despite it's overly melodramatic approach and a forgettable villiain, Deathstroke Knights and Dragons: The Movie is still a really good DC animated movie that's fun and action packed. Michael Chiklis gives a great lead performance and Sasha Alexander, Griffin Puatu and Faye Mata are all really good. Sung Jin Ahn's direction is really good, it's well paced and the animation is also really good. The music by Kevin Riepl is good.

Deathstroke could possibly be the action hero movie that will save DC. They need to work fast and get this on the big screens. I don't know what's taking them so long. The animation was great, the story was great and I love the action n directing.

Regrettably, the writing of the movie prefers to tell than show, in most of the conversations characters pause the movie to explain to the viewer something that could have been better integrated, and most of these times the other characters know the information already. Exposition is important and it is everywhere, in every storytelling format, but this movie is a good example of how to not do it.

The villain has an interesting character design, but he is poorly developed, with a horrible motivation to drive the plot, without spoiling it, you will find his reason for ruining Deathstroke's life quite laughable, and entirely his fault, it feels like an afterthought from the writer, added at the last moment, hurting the plot more than helping.

The animation style matches the theme of the movie pretty well, but it is sadly let down by a generic story that fails at any and every twist and turn. I am not sure why the movie is so violent when it seems to be written for a younger audience, trying to make Deathstroke into a relatable antihero.

When written by someone who actually cares about the source material, Deathstroke the Terminator has less to do with Teen Titans and more to do with being the shadowy scourge of 3rd world dictators and despots across the globe (for a hefty price). This is a character that can hold his own with Batman.

The story deserved better than cringe dialogue from the empowered when it's convenient ex-Wife. The tragic father routine loses all merit if you can't make the family dynamic in this story at least passable. Yet everyone's motivations seem completely at odds with with that end state. A strained relationship makes sense, but upon watching this you can't believe they ever cared about each other.

I know Greg Berlanti is the the DCEU rosters most consistent hit maker (except for Legends of Tomorrow, Batwoman, and late series Flash, and the unforgivable Stargirl), but a hard R rating is useless without a story to push it forward. Why is the script seemingly the last thing that people care about?