Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (2009)

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies arrives from 2009, a period when the animated superhero feature still knew its place. Lex Luthor has been elected president during an economic depression, the economy hums along under his stewardship, and he uses an approaching Kryptonite meteor to frame Superman for murder and place a billion dollar bounty on two of the more prominent heads in the DC catalogue. What follows is a long, agreeable chase. Villains want money. Heroes want order. Batman wants everyone to be quiet. The film runs barely over an hour and apologizes for none of it.

The voice cast is quietly varied. CCH Pounder, LeVar Burton, and Ricardo Chavira fill out the ensemble, and nobody in the script pauses to remark on it, which is either a modest virtue or simply how DC animation staffed its bench in those years. Power Girl and Amanda Waller both act with force and both move the plot, though neither is offered as an argument about anything. Luthor, meanwhile, is a plutocrat who exploits a depression and abuses his office, which lends the proceedings a faint anti-elite flavor. The critique stays personal. He is a bad man, not a bad system.

Absences define the rest. The meteor is cosmic, not climatic. No character wrestles with identity, body, or mind in any legible modern sense. The film does not lecture. It has no thesis to deliver, no sermon to append, and there is something restful in that, if also a little inert. A competent specimen, then, assembled with professional calm and no apparent interest in the cultural weather that would follow it. The readings come in low across the board, and the film seems untroubled by the fact.