Half Review of BATMAN AND HARLEY QUINN
Not a full review. This is a half review. There are sort of spoilers below, but there is not much to spoil. Read at own risk.
Saw the first half.
Sum up:
Batman blackmails police officer over visits to S&M dominatrix. Poison Ivy, who is trying to stop global warming by turning all humans into Swamp Thing. The Floronic Man is helping her (sorta cool).
Bats visits the crime scene. Cops says his men have finetoothcombed it already. Bats boasts about his own awesome. Huhn? Never seen that before. But it was apparently played straight (sorta lame).
Nightwing bloodhounds Harley, finds her by mistake. She is working in a Hooters type diner where the waitresses dress like sexy superheroines. Harley is there dressed as herself (sorta cool).
Nightwing follows her home. Harley mugs him. Nightwing punches cute little Harley in the face over and over again like it is normal for heroes to punch little girls. Played straight.
She uses diluted Joker venom on Nightwing (sorta cool.)
Harley beats him up, ties him to the bed, copulates outside of wedlock. Played for laughs.
Thinks he’s “Nightwig.” Played for laughs.
Dick Grayson, who escape-artists his way out of death traps every Sunday before brunch, suddenly cannot get out of a square knot. Lame. Unheroic.
Batman walks in on Nightwing and Harley playing tickle game on bed. Played for laughs.
(Nightwing and Starfire were an item when I read comics. Wonder what war-babe of Vega does when finds boyfriend dipping wick in crazypants.)
Harley forced by Batman to help look for Ivy. As payback, Harley farts in the batmobile, and then farts again. Played for laughs.
Harley chases random guy the street through alleys and across rooftops, and, since she is a little girl, she beats him up handily. Played for laughs.
Random guy stood her up at the prom for a “shiksa”. (Harley’s Jewish. Of course. No Christians in comics aside from Daredevil and Brother Blood, eh?)
Harley sings Debbie Harris in hoodlum bar. Badly. Camera focused tightly on her wiggling assets. Tasteless, even for me.
Batman faces bar room full of mooks and henchmen. Instead of fightscene, the outside of the bar is displayed, with words like OUCH and BLOOD overwritten. Batman then seen in batmobile, smiling. Played for laughs.
I will not be watching the second half.
Please note that at every point above where it says “played for laughs” yours truly did not laugh. Nor smile. Nor raise an eyebrow like Spock.
Perhaps I am overly sensitive, but between the global warming and Bats uttering self-affirmation and the infantile fart jokes and the inability of trained superninja athlete Dick Grayson to curbstomp crazygirl because genderequality, I smell the foetid odor of SJW.
Bruce Timm is a great and creative man, and, had I not seen this, I would be vowing to this hour that he could not produce a bad script or helm a bad project.
Wrong. He can. He did.
Even the great Bruce Timm cannot introduce SJW themes and ideas into a film without ruining the characters.
It is not that he is not great enough in his creative genius. Even Arachne cannot weave dung into silk rope. It is that SJWs themes are by their nature so foul that no one can touch them without provoking stench and stink.
In real stories written by sane people for sane people have real characters with real depth.
SJWs hate depth, because moral conflict, interpersonal conflict, heavy problems with something at stake, all inhabit a universe where actions have consequences.
In Harley’s case her character is that she is in madly in love with a psychoclown, who treats her like dirt, and there are endless possibilities here for comedy and tragedy. She wants to go straight, but keeps getting pulled back in.
Nightwing’s character is that he wants to be Batman, but not get pulled into the darkness at the heart of the world. In this show, he does nothing Gabby of the Newsboy legion could not have done just as well: track down a suspect in a montage scene.
Batman’s tension is that his parents were gunned down before his very eyes and died in pools of blood in his arms when he was a child, and he has lived for vengeance against all criminals everywhere as a dark avenger.
That is in the real comics, back when comics were good.
In cloudcuckooland, where SJWs live, nothing has consequences, because there are no winners nor losers and everyone gets a participation trophy.
So it is here: In the first half of the film, no act in the plot was related in a consequential fashion to any build up. Nothing was really at stake.
Maybe those of you who watch it will say I quit too early. Maybe so. But the things a writer is supposed to do by the first act, or even in the prologue, had not been done yet.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
