Back in 2017, I declared that Wonder Woman was the best movie that had come out of the DC Cinematic Universe, which was really damning with faint praise. It was good, but not great. I didn’t expect much better with the new movie and as the trailers started to come out, I started to get a really, really bad feeling about the end product. It just looked like a disjointed mess, especially the scenes with Wonder Woman “riding the lightning”.

It’s really a shame that I was right about it all along.Before I get started, I wanted to say something about my new movie review strategy. I will still be reviewing movies, but only the ones that I actually feel I have something to say about. Back in the day when I was just trying to fill slots, I would review almost everything that I ever watched, but those days are gone. I’m reviewing WW84 because I want to, not because I have to. Thought I would just get that out of the way.

Anyhow, this movie is kind of a hot mess, which is a shame because I still really like Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. We start off with a sequence of young Wonder Woman competing against a bunch of adult warriors to run through what they describe as a really difficult course,  but we never see anyone even close to getting injured. I think we see one of them fall into a pool of water. That doesn’t scream difficult. Anyhow, we see that she learns that she can’t cheat, which would be a fine object lesson, except we never see it again in the movie. Not really anyhow.

I think the real problem with WW84 is that they’re trying to do too much and too many raw experiments end up in the final product. Steve Trevor was entirely unnecessary, he appears only so they have something to put in the trailers. He adds nothing of substance to the movie and results only as someone to have Diana cry over at the end. Big deal. Sorry, there is no on-screen chemistry between the two and Wonder Woman and villain Max Lord worked far better together. In fact, that was something that they entirely missed, given how many things Patty Jenkins just threw at the wall and hoped would stick. That might have been a better story.

So we get Kristen Wiig as the soon-to-be Cheetah (more on that disaster later) and she is never a believable character. It’s all been done before. Jim Carrey’s Riddler back in Batman & Robin. Jamie Foxx’s Electro back in Amazing Spider-Man 2. All of the bumbling, clumsy fools that turn into super-villains (bad super-villains at that), it’s a really poorly done trope and WW84 falls straight into it. Anyhow, other than the bumbling idiot that Wiig plays (that seems to be common for her), there’s nothing of substance to her. She’s supposed to be this brilliant gemologist, but we never really see her do anything amazing. Show, don’t tell, movie. And then, in the end, when she becomes Cheetah, that comes entirely out of the blue. It was kind of dumb, but we’ll get back to that.

Really, there is nothing believable about the plot. Max Lord is a failed entrepreneur who wants to be an oil tycoon, ostensibly to impress his son from a broken relationship which we never see, the kid just keeps showing up, and for some reason, he keeps pretending that he gives a damn what this kid thinks, while never actually seeing it on screen. It comes off more that Max is trying to convince himself that he’s a great person than caring what this kid thinks. So Max gets his hands on a magical rock and suddenly, he can grant wishes while getting things from those he grants wishes to. The entire movie went off the rails at that point and while I’ve seen people saying that Max acted intelligently with his new-found powers, I just never saw that. He didn’t have a plan, he just foundered around from rich person to rich person telling them what they should wish for and then picking what he should take from them in return, but he never did anything with any of the things he acquired. He wanted oil resources, but we never saw him do anything with it. It was always moving on to the next thing. Big deal.

So let’s get back to Cheetah. Wiig’s character wishes she could be just like Diana and starts to get strong and confident while Diana keeps getting weaker, although never so weak that she’s not able to kick everyone’s ass. So anyhow, Barbara Minerva wants to be just like Diana, but in the end, she decides she wants to be an “apex predator” and Max turns her into Cheetah. Where did any of that come from? How did she leap wildly from wanting to be strong and confident to being a wild animal? Besides cheetahs are not apex predators, but never mind reality, right? The CGI is just terrible and the fight between Cheetah and Wonder Woman in her crappy gold armor was just painful to watch. What was the point of the armor anyhow? It was just Wonder Woman wrapping her shield around her and Cheetah bashing at it. What’s the point?

Let’s talk about that armor for a second. Clearly, it existed only to sell more toys because it was completely useless and it came out of the blue with 30 seconds of exposition. It was the armor of some long lost heroine and now, for some reason, Diana has it so she can wear it in the finale and sell more action figures. How dumb is that?

Anyhow, Cheetah gets pretty easily dispatched, just because they had to have a fight in the third act, and she goes up against Lord, who has put himself on television and there’s this absurd story that the particles that come from TV sets are the same as touching him, so he can grant wishes to everyone on the planet and gain more power. Did anyone actually think about how stupid that was before they filmed it? I didn’t think so. We see Wonder Woman with her whip flailing around, defeated while Max is in this beam of light telling people to make wishes and suddenly…

Well, before we get to that, let’s talk about the whip. You know, for a “lasso of truth” she rarely ever used it for that. Mostly, she spent the whole time using it as a makeshift web so she could do a Sam Raimi Spider-Man impression, swinging around the mall and, worst of all, on lightning.  And by the time she does the latter, she’d already learned to fly, so it was just done as trailer fodder, which again, is just dumb. She can fly! Well, actually, she could fly in the last movie so I’m not sure why it’s so amazing this time around, but she could fly! What’s the point of the lightning nonsense? Oh right, it looks cool and looks good in the trailer.

And speaking of stupid crap thrown in because it looks good, let’s get back to Chris Pine and the wholly unnecessary Steve Trevor. They have to go somewhere so she steals a jet fighter and then, through silly movie magic, just imagines that it ought to be invisible so we can have an “invisible jet” callback to the comics and original 1975 TV series, but the whole thing is really stupid. First off, Steve Trevor, who flew back in WWI, would never be able to even start a modern jet, much less take off in one. Secondly, the whole “I’ve been practicing making things invisible” shtick was just stupid in the extreme. Third, even if the jet was invisible, radar would still be able to see it! Radar doesn’t operate on visible light! And then they go flying through fireworks. You know, explosives shot up into the air. Sure, that’s a smart idea.

Anyhow, let’s get back to the finale. Diana, whose magic lasso had been bouncing off of Max Lord this whole time, suddenly wraps itself around his leg and makes him admit that he’s doing it all for power. Now, people worldwide have to renounce their wishes and take back their power from Max. Diana had renounced her wish for Steve to come back, apparently Barbara renounced her desire to be Cheetah, although we never see that on screen as far as I remember, and everyone, everywhere, stops wishing for all of the stupid crap that just about caused an international nuclear war. Of course, everyone seems to remember if happening, we see the military techs saying “the missiles are disappearing” so even after all of this happens, apparently the whole planet remembers everything that went on, which is really, really stupid, but what can you expect from this disaster?

So the nukes are coming in and Max runs off looking for his son. You know, that kid he just abandoned in his office before flying off to the other side of the country so he could con the president and get on TV? The kid that he’s shown no actual attachment to this entire movie? Nope, suddenly, he has to run outside looking for his kid, who was hiding in the bushes and there’s a pointless touching moment that might actually mean something had they ever foreshadowed any of it or made their relationship remotely believable. But no, that’s mostly how it ends, with one more bit that’s probably even worse.

See, when Steve came back, he didn’t just come back, he hijacked the body of some random guy who lived near Diana. So all the while, it wasn’t Steve, it was some guy. When Diana and Steve were sleeping together, it was some mind-controlled rando who, for all we know, had a wife and some kids and a job that he lost because he just vanished for a while and suddenly at the end, Diana runs into this guy in the street and they talk. Why? What was the point of all of that? If the magical dream rock can make real nuclear missiles and real walls appear out of the desert, why can’t it make a real Steve Trevor? We’ll never know because this whole thing was really, really stupid.

Finally, the mid-credits sequence where they have a cameo by Lynda Carter, the original 1975 Wonder Woman, as Asteria, the warrior who had once worn her armor, and she says something about having done all of this for a long time while looking straight into the camera. Yeah… come on. Cute concept, really terrible execution.

I honestly wanted to like this movie. Then I started seeing trailers and figured I would just skip it, but then, I heard some people saying it wasn’t that bad, I had nothing better to do, so we sat down and watched it and I honestly regret having done so. There are a lot of ideas that might have made a good movie, but it was all jumbled together into an unwatchable mess and I haven’t seen that many people who have actually said it’s a good movie. Most have said it was terrible and I have to agree. I still like Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman but this thing was just a hot mess that needed a lot of help with before it was ready for the big acreen. Cheetah could have been completely written out of the movie. Or, as I thought later on, maybe there should have been a real relationship between Barbara and Max and she could have been the one that made him change his mind in the end. But then, you wouldn’t have had a fight at the end and the number of action scenes in this movie were minimal at best already. Nobody ever sat down and thought of pacing because this movie was all over the place. There is no real continuity. Max gives a large donation to the museum that Barbara and Diana work at, immediately followed by a scene where he has no money and he’s begging for investor money. Then where did he get the money for the donation? Who the hell knows.

Anyhow, I’m going to give this thing two stars out of five, mostly because they even got it out this year, but moreso out of pity. This could have been decent, it should have been decent, but I have no idea what went so horribly, horribly wrong, but it just wasn’t. It had a lot of pieces that got jumbled up and none of it really works together. I know Patty Jenkins had a hand in writing the movie, but if this is the best she can do, maybe they need to keep her out of the writer’s room in the future. This movie really sucks.