Justice League (2017)

  I fully expected this to suck balls.  I wasn't even going to waste money to see it in theaters.  All the fuzzy warmth from Wonder Woman couldn't save it, plagued with rewrites, and Zach Snyder getting all over it, and DC having to sweet-talk Joss Whedon to coming in and salvaging the wreckage.

But salvage he did and Justice League isn't nearly the shitshow I thought it was going to be.  It's not perfect, by any stretch, and it owes plenty to Marvel's Avengers and not just in Whedon.

Superman's (Henry Cavill) death sent ripples throughout the world, awakening an ancient force known as the Mother boxes.  In turn, the boxes call Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) from exile to reclaim them and turn the earth into a chaotic hellscape.  Batman (Ben Affleck) knows he can't defeat this threat by himself so he recruits Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), The Flash (Ezra Miller), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) to join with him and stop Steppenwolf from combining the three boxes.

Honestly, if it weren't for Gadot and Miller, this probably wouldn't be worth watching.  She brings such a warmth and humanity to what could have been a cold, macho posturing.  Every scene with her seemed brighter.  Miller is one of the best young up-and-coming actors emerging today and I am so happy to see him in this role.

I would love to see Momoa get more comedic parts.  He has been typecast as this brooding, stoic, musclebound hero but in interviews he's very lively.  I just hope his solo outing lets us see a bit more of his personality.  Ray Fisher is a total unknown but he has some serious star potential.  I'm actually looking forward to seeing what he'll do next with the role.

And before all of you start thinking that I'm just going to gush with praise over this outing, I have to say something about The Most Expensive Facial Hair in the World.  What the actual fuck.  That has got to be the worst CGI I have seen in a movie from this decade.

For those of you who have better things to do with your lives than troll movie news sites, Henry Cavill grew a mustache for the next movie he is in (Mission:  Impossible 6) before being asked to come back and do a bunch of reshoots for Justice League.  He either was not allowed or refused to shave the mustache, which required the VFX team to remove it digitally.  They only had a certain amount of time to accomplish this so it is very obvious in the movie how many scenes were reshot.  Every time you see Cavill's mouth look like it's trying to move off the screen, it's a reshoot.  In fact, I only counted two scenes where it wasn't.  To me, this is just further proof that Warner Bros. and DC are trying way too hard to seem viable in competition with Marvel.