Justice League: Doom Reviews

I got the distinct sense about midway that Justice League: Doom was going to be all a great lead-up to a rushed, action-heavy, truncated third act. I was right. Doom borrows liberally from the well-known and beloved storyline Tower of Babel, in which an arch-villain of the JLA gets their hands on Batman’s secret files on how to eliminate every member of the group, should it ever become necessary.

I’ve never understood the insistence on making these things as short as possible. Doom really suffers from the rushed script, never allowing the plot to slow down enough for us to truly digest what we’re seeing happen before we’re on to the next set piece. My best theory is budgetary issues making it so they can only afford to produce so much of an animated feature.

That Batman has a secret set of files to take down characters as overly-powered as Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter and Superman is no great shock, a nice wrinkle in his complicated characterization and sense of heroism. His thinking behind creating such safety nets is coldly logical, even if it does betray his closest friendships.

Once they’re stolen by a group made up some of the League’s most infamous adversaries and implemented, the film becomes a wall-to-wall action extravaganza filled with nice animation, clean and effective character designs (although Superman does look a little too boyish for my taste), a reunion of most of the DCAU’s Justice League series cast and interesting twists as we watch the heroes greatest strengths become their downfalls.

The problem is that the film barely begins to explore this moral quandary – is Batman truly wrong for creating contingency plans? Why didn’t he create one for himself? – before it settles into slam-bang-pow action mode. The reactions to various characters learning that Batman has created these plans and his reasoning behind it is limited to the very last scene in which they discuss it for about two minutes. He’s not completely in the wrong for creating these files. Where he messes up is in not securing them better. Think about it, if we lived in a world where Superman could go rogue either through his own volition or through some kind of mind-control, wouldn’t you want a plan to help stop him? Schools, government facilities, your work place all have these kind of safety steps and procedures should anything go wrong – why wouldn’t we have them for our superheroes?

It’s this kind of interesting moral ambiguity and debate that could have made Justice League: Doom rank up there with Batman: Under the Red Hood as one of the greatest of these movies. As it is, it’s a very good one, never quite giving itself the chance to fully blossom. Doom is a little bit better than Doomsday, and about as good as Public Enemies.