DC League of Super-Pets (2022)

DC League of Super-Pets arrives with a premise engineered in a laboratory to avoid giving offense: a Kryptonian Labrador, a shelter boxer, and three other rescue animals acquire powers from orange kryptonite and set out to free the kidnapped Justice League from a guinea pig with a grudge. It is bright, brisk, and professionally assembled by the Warner Animation Group, which is to say it does exactly what it says on the tin and then stops.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a curious case. Its voice cast is genuinely varied, with Dascha Polanco as Jessica Cruz, Daveed Diggs as Cyborg, and Diego Luna lending Chip a Spanish accent, yet none of this is ever remarked upon. The characters exist, and the film moves on. Women occupy substantial roles, from Lois Lane to Wonder Woman to the villainous Lulu, and the potbellied pig PB is a devoted Wonder Woman fan, but the screenplay offers no argument about any of it. Lex Luthor is a corporate chief executive, which the film treats as a job description and not a thesis. Merton's poor eyesight and Chip's paranoia are punchlines, not portraits.

The result is a film with almost no interest in instructing its audience. There is no sermon here, no moment where the music swells and a lesson about society gets delivered to the captive children in the room. A dog learns to share his owner with a fiancée, a shelter dog is adopted, and a guinea pig is imprisoned in a hot dog stand. Whether that constitutes a virtue or a missed opportunity depends entirely on what you brought with you. The film wants to show a turtle running very fast. It succeeds. The classification file on this one is thin, and I find I do not mind.