Three years since the original, Wonder Woman is finally returning to Irish cinemas.
The first Wonder Woman movie was released in 2017, but it feels like an entire lifetime of events have taken place in the DC movie universe since then. The Justice League arrived, nobody liked it, so it is coming again as a four-hour mini-series. Shazam went small and fun, Aquaman went big and fun, while Joker had everyone talking Best Picture. Birds Of Prey didn't make much of a dent in the collective memory despite being pretty great, and the world is already looking forward to another Suicide Squad and another Batman.
Truth be told, the DC universe is kind of a mess right now, with timelines all over the place, and different actors playing different versions of the same characters, but at least the movies are getting more entertaining, right? Which is a pretty succinct way of describing this Wonder Woman sequel: fun, but messy.
Set 70 years after the events of the first movie, Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is living a quiet life of solitude in Washington DC - she's still about 35 years away from meeting Batman and Superman in Dawn of Justice - breaking up her museum historian day job with fighting crime. She crosses paths with the geeky Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), another museum employee who happens to be investigating a mysterious crystal discovered at the scene of a robbery that Wonder Woman managed to foil.
It is this powerful crystal that draws the attention of conniving businessman Max Lord (Pedro Pascal), while also allows for the return of Diana's one-and-only true love Steve Rogers (Chris Pine), and it is this crystal's powers that set up the movie's big, BIG plot swing - one that you'll either go with and enjoy, or get hung up on and not ride out the messy-but-fun wave the rest of the story is pinned to.
The biggest problem is one similar to the original, in that Wonder Woman doesn't know how grounded it really wants to be, and that lack of clarity leads to a massively erratic tone. In the first movie, it was mostly confined to the final act when Diana had to literally duke it out with the ancient God of War, but here it arrives early and stays present throughout. And even at a lengthy two-and-a-half-hour run-time, certain elements feel very rushed. Story threads are left dangling all over the place, leading to plenty of frustratingly unanswered questions, leaving us unsure if they are sequel-bait or just massive plot-holes.
There is more fun to be had from Wiig's villainy, a mash-up of Jim Carrey's The Riddler (obsessed with our hero and becoming a dark version of them) and Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman (gets a glow-up and promptly starts causing trouble), and Wiig is clearly having a ball in the roll, completely snatching every scene she's in. Ditto with the return of Pine, who is more than game to be butt of every fish-out-of-water joke that the script can throw his way, and he and Gadot have some genuinely great chemistry together.
The retro setting also brings a lot of laughs - there is no outfit or hairdo
too eighties for this movie - and thanks to some contrivances, whenever Wonder Woman finds herself in one of the (surprisingly few) action sequences, she is in genuine peril, as opposed to being boringly overpowered, i.e. the Superman problem.
It is this Superman problem that also presents a problem for our leading lady Gal Gadot, who is given very little to do other than be heroic. Once again we've got a superhero movie being swallowed up by the more interesting villains.
It all adds up to something that is plenty entertaining, as long as you keep your brain... well, if not switched off, definitely on a low-power setting. There is enough here to definitely warrant an interesting sequel, but Wonder Woman herself needs to be given more to do in her movies, and DC need to decide how crazy OR grounded that needs to be, because being both isn't going to work out a third time around.
Wonder Woman 1984 will arrive in Irish cinemas on Wednesday, December 16.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFwQZczoiV4
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