Teen Titans: The Judas Contract (2017)

Another entry in the long-running animated line from Warner Bros., this one arriving as a direct sequel to the previous Titans outing and adapting a 1984 comic storyline that had been sitting in a drawer since the George W. Bush administration. Sam Liu directs with the efficiency of a man who has done this before, because he has. The plot concerns a cult leader who wishes to drain the powers of a team of teenage heroes, a mercenary with a grudge, and a young woman named Terra who may or may not be telling the truth about anything.

The roster is drawn from decades of comic canon, which means we get a Latina Blue Beetle, a Black Bumblebee, and an orange alien who leads the team. The film treats their presence as unremarkable, which it is. No romantic subplot ventures anywhere near same-sex territory. Terra is the most interesting figure here, a double agent whose betrayal and eventual death carry the emotional weight, and the women around her fight capably, though nobody is delivering a thesis about it. There is no racial commentary to speak of, no scene in which anyone explains what any of this means.

The villains are a power-hungry cult and a freelance assassin, so the economic critique is absent, and the environment is not mentioned once. Nobody discusses their relationship with their body. Nobody is diagnosed with anything. The 1984 source material is adapted straight, with no corrections to the historical record. And the moral instruction is essentially nil; the film would rather show you a fight than tell you how to feel about it. A brisk, competent exercise in licensed storytelling that has no interest in the culture war and no intention of joining it.