Justice League Dark

Regular people are committing crimes after hallucinating demons as the people around them. The Justice League is out of their element in this world of magic. Batman gets possessed by Deadman and given a message, Constantine. He recruits Zatanna to find Constantine to battle the mysterious new evil. With the help of Swamp Thing, the group fights Destiny.

The start is nice and it shows the JL unable to deal with magic. It gives a good reason to assemble a Justice League Dark. The secondary need is to present compelling characters. The JL characters are household names but these other ones are generally not. Constantine is great and Zatanna provides a good foil possibility. I'm not sure Batman is the natural bridge. It may be more compelling to send Superman and have him overwhelmed by magic. It would show that physical power is useless in this realm. There is a lot of explosive action which is like a crutch for this movie. It needs to set a different tone from the JL. Overall, it's a good start and time will tell if this goes anywhere good.

In the wake of the inconsistency of the live-action, universe building marathon, it's refreshing to see a simpler, more straightforward, yet still effectively intriguing story-telling pace set by DC's animated feature titles. JLD continues the trend of it's predecessor, excelling at brief but complete introductions to some of DC's more obscure characters, bringing them out of the shadows. The use of the overly popular Batman is very fitting here and die-hard and new fans should find a bunch to like. Animation is solid, the voice-casting is even better. Admittedly, this kind of animation is not for everyone (it's not on the grand scale of say, Disney). In retrospect, the Suicide Squad film would've benefited from a similar screenplay/storytelling. Hey WB, can we get some of these writers on board with the live action stuff?

This movie is an interesting take on the JLD run. I do not agree with everything it does, but I do believe it holds it's own. One complaint people new to the magics of the DCU may have is that Zatana and Constantine seem to have limitless power. Trust me there are lomits, it's just this is a short animated piece, that really doesn't have time to go into that.

If you can overlook that, then this movie will entertain you, but it will fall short if they never do anything with JLD again. Over all the animation is toght, the plot is dense with out seeming to rushed, and they got personalities right.

Justice League Dark didn't disappoint any of my expectations, being another good entry for the DC animated universe.

It was entertaining to watch and it had a nice animation and designs. It was also nice to see some often overlooked characters from DC comics (Such as Deadman) getting some spotlight, and honestly more of these lesser know characters deserve their own opportunity to shine.

And honestly I don't know why this got an "R", taking into consideration how The Flashpoint Paradox got only a PG-13 rating despite being far more violent than this movie.

I put up this disclaimer before reviewing anything related to comic books and that is, I am not a very avid comic book reader because of it's unavailability here. I keep myself at pace via websites and I am certainly up to date regarding the DC animated movies. Believe it or not, but I've watched all of them.

SCREENPLAY - The story and the dialogues are very 50/50 but thank you DC, for making it R-rated. The banter is pretty good. Especially Deadman and Batman. They have the best punch-lines and Batman's "hmmm" always cracked me up. Without going too much into detail, a part of the movie felt a tad bit like Kingsman. If it's a reference to the comics, which the readers can point out, then it's cool but to me, it felt a bit clichéd. The expository stuff was surprisingly kept at a minimum. There was some of it of course but, I've seen in the other animated movies where everything just comes to a halt and some character is just hurling exposition. The callbacks between Zatana and Constantine sometimes felt over-used. I have watched the T.V. Show of Constantine, so I know what happened in Newcastle but they were ranting about things that happened all over the world. I mean, maybe it's entertaining for the comic-book readers but from a writer's point of view, using the same trope too many times reduces it's effect.

ART-DIRECTION - Let me get rid of the gripes I had about the animation. First of all at around 17 minutes into the movie, Deadman is opaque and transparent even when he hasn't been made visible by Constantine. Second, sometimes the expressions of the characters didn't change with the dialogue. I know it is nitpicking but you'll begin to notice after some time. If that would happen to a live actor, I would call it a wooden performance. Now, the pros. The action sequences were amazing. Especially the second last fight. That really got me pumped up. Earlier there used to be a lot of cut- away's during a fight sequence. The difference here was that each individual fight was done for a longer time before interjecting it with a scene. That increased the intensity of the fights by a notch.

VOICE-ACTING - There were a lot of known actors and actresses doing the voices like, Rosario Dawson as Wonder Woman, Alfred Molina as Destiny and of course Matt Ryan as Constantine. It's so sad that his show got cancelled. It was the only DC character I was invested in, especially due to his performance. Nicholas Torturro was amazing as Boston Brand. I know people will be hypothetically punching me for saying this, but he felt like the Deadpool of the lot. All the others were great as well, no complaints in the voice-acting department.

FINAL VERDICT - At one point I was thinking that what is Batman doing in the middle of all this magic and hocus-pocus. Just then all these magical elements started to deconstruct his character and I was like,"Oh! That's why he is there". It is quite rightfully rated R because there is a lot of violence, but personally, I wanted a little bit more. Maybe I am sadistic but if you agree then give me some assurance that I am not as sadistic as I think I am. Do give this one a watch. I am sure DC fans will, but if you're a fan of animated movies, I am sure this one won't disappoint.