Review of Justice League Dark (2017) by Henry P — 10 Feb 2017

There's not much to say about Justice League: Dark. It's not bad, but it's not praiseworthy. It starts out with some random woman going into road rage based on a hallucination, and when the cops show up, she realizes she plowed through actual people.

After that, we see a man hold his family hostage, again, under the assumption they are demons. Finally, we meet Batman (Jason O'Mara) as he saves a baby girl from her mother who threw her off a building because she thought she "gave birth to the devil," and after Batman saves the baby, the mother is found dead on the sidewalk with blood slowly spreading around her.

Parents, this is not the type of Batman film you can sit your kids in front of if you want an hour's peace, unless you want them traumatized. While I wasn't really horrified by anything in this film (being an adult makes it too easy to remember they're fake), it didn't really feel R, but it got that for the blood pools and supernatural stuff.

After the Justice League decides to call on supernatural heroes to fight supernatural forces, Batman goes out to get these supernatural fighters: Zatanna (Camilla Luddington), John Constantine (Matt Ryan), Deadman (Nicholas Turturro), and Jason Blood/Etrigan the Demon (Ray Chase).

These four, plus Swamp Thing (Roger Cross) and Batman are the focus, and if you saw any trailers for this, the Justice League is in this as much as they are in the trailers. The characters we focus on have their moments, but character development is weak.

That may have to do with the fact we barely get to know them, and despite the best efforts of Warner Animation, they still just feel thrown-together. What really killed character development was the pace: too fast.

They could have given it a slightly longer run time to develop these characters (John Constantine and Zatanna had a past relationship worth exploring a little more, and Batman was really just Batman and not much else).

Robert J. Kral crafts an appropriate soundtrack here, the animation looks fine, everything is there for a reason, the story is coherent, and there's a microscopic comic relief from Constantine, but not much else beyond that.

There was some salty language, but about as much as you'd expect from one of Batman's blockbuster adventures. The R-rating comes from the intensity of their supernatural situations and more bloody violence than said blockbusters.

Worth it if you're a fan of Constantine or are curious about the supernatural elements of the DC universe, but nothing too impressive here.