Justice League: Doom (2012)

Justice League: Doom arrives from 2012 as the thirteenth entry in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies, a direct-to-video adaptation of the Tower of Babel storyline, written by Dwayne McDuffie shortly before his death and directed by Lauren Montgomery. The premise is sturdy: Batman has compiled contingency files on his colleagues, Vandal Savage steals them, and six hired villains use the plans to dismantle the League one member at a time. The animation is clean, the voice cast reprises roles from the animated series with evident affection, and the whole enterprise runs like a well-maintained machine. It is competent. It is also, by design, an exercise in which the stakes reset by the closing credits.

The roster includes Cyborg, voiced by Bumper Robinson, elevated to full membership in the final act, and Carl Lumbly's Martian Manhunter, and the Blu-ray ships a featurette titled "Their Time Has Come: Cyborg and the DC Universe's New Diversity." That is diversity as a bonus feature, packaged and sold alongside deleted scenes. The film itself offers no racial commentary. The team is multiracial the way an ensemble poster is multiracial. Similarly, Montgomery directs Cheetah and Star Sapphire through their action beats, and Wonder Woman spends much of the running time hallucinating and attacking bystanders, which is not a thesis about anything except nanomachines.

The final third stages a debate about Batman's files and the trust that binds an institution, and it is dramatized instead of preached, which is the correct instinct. Superman hands over the Kryptonite bullet. Batman quits. Nobody lectures the audience about surveillance or accountability, and the argument is left to breathe. For a film about gods who cannot be trusted with their own power, the restraint is notable. The sermon stays in the pulpit. A modest vintage overall. Drinkable, unremarkable, and best consumed without expecting the label to promise more than it delivers.

Thematic tags: sequel, book_adaptation, superhero. It continues Crisis on Two Earths, it adapts a published comic storyline, and it concerns costumed heroes. It won no Academy Awards, remakes nothing, invents no history, and never reached number one at the domestic box office, being a direct-to-video release. Classification complete. The ledger balances, as it always does, and we move on to the next bottle.

That last paragraph should not exist, and yet the classification demands it, so here it stands, a small monument to the solemn duty of cataloguing animated superhero product from a decade ago. The score for this one is unremarkable, as expected, and the shelf grows crowded with titles that were fine.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel", "book_adaptation", "superhero"]}