Where’s the Beef, Wonder Woman 1984?

A s of Christmas Day, the “Imagine” video is no longer the worst film Gal Gadot and Kristen Wiig have released in 2020. Wonder Woman 1984 is an ode to parachute pants, fanny packs, eyeball-scorchingly bright colors, teased pouffy hair, and shopping malls, but the throwback item it implanted in my mind is Cheez Whiz. This movie is laboratory-made processed corporate goop in a can.

Picture the dumbest imaginable Cold War script, except with so little effort to make the action scenes zing that you might as well be watching an episode of T. J. Hooker or Hardcastle and McCormick. Wonder Woman 1984 is clunky throughout, but saves the worst for last, staging a comically awful climactic fight during which one character climbs into a costume left over from a touring production of Cats, or possibly made from the covering of a novelty fuzzy pillow purchased at Spencer’s Gifts.  

After a pointless prologue featuring a prepubescent Diana that seems shoved in solely to pander to merchandise-buying nine-year-old female viewers, we jump to Eighties Washington, D.C., where the ageless Diana Prince (Gadot) is a lonely scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, having lost boyfriend Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) when he got blown up in 1918 in Wonder Woman. Since we’ve all seen Pine in the trailers, it’s no surprise to find his character has somehow been brought back, but the way the script does so is moronically forced even by comic-book-movie standards.

At the Smithsonian, there’s a klutzy fellow “Doctor,” meaning academic with an inferiority complex, Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), who yearns to be besties with Diana. Barbara is of course a supervillain in the making but, sorry, you can’t be intimidating if your name is “Barbara.” Every time someone mentions Barbara, instead of striking fear into the hearts of the audience the name conjures up one of Wiig’s goofiest creations, “Brahbrah,” a cross-eyed lover of epileptic dogs, on Flight of the Conchords. Except for a couple of early scenes when Wiig does her patented passive-aggressive mumbling, her talents are completely wasted here, and her character’s #MeToo moments are cynical plays to be credited with social relevance.

The lead villain is even less compelling: Max Lord is a sort of triple spoof of late-night infomercial pitchmen, TV evangelists, and motivational speakers. Max is played by Pedro Pascal, who looks a lot cooler in his Mandalorian suit. Without it, he’s about as badass as the assistant floor manager down at Bennigan’s. Supposedly a charismatic con man who stumbles onto world-dominating power, Max instead comes across as so pathetic that I felt sorry for him when I was supposed to be terrified. The guy is such an obvious loser that I hoped he’d gain absolute domination over something — okay, maybe he shouldn’t be allowed to exert telepathic control of everyone’s brains, but could we at least let him command the housewares department at the Bethesda Sears?

Since the quantum leap of Batman Begins 15 years ago, the superhero genre has made a spectacularly successful effort to acquire dramatic heft by establishing more plausibility and real-world grounding than ever before. All of that progress gets ditched here. WW84, which was directed by Patty Jenkins from a script she co-wrote with Geoff Johns and David Callaham, relies so heavily on cornball gimmicks and dumb coincidences that it might as well have been written in 1984 — the year of Supergirl. A giveaway that the writers are adrift is when they’re so desperate for spectacle that they start randomly chucking in every ounce of super-stuff they can think of, no matter how poorly thought-out. Wonder Woman’s famous invisible plane comes about with what equates to a snap of her fingers, and her magic lasso turns out to have so many magical functions it starts to feel like a fantasy equivalent of the Veg-o-Matic. The more the writers tell themselves, “This’ll look cool,” the dopier things get. (But if you make it to the end, do keep watching through the first few minutes of the closing credits.)

The DC style, having explored exciting new terrain based in the shivery visions of Christopher Nolan, then ventured further into the darkness with Zack Snyder, is now merely adrift. The excellent original Wonder Woman is the last worthy effort in the series, not counting Joker, which is exterior to the DC universe. Having forsaken the charred moral landscapes of Nolan/Snyder but unable to match Marvel’s sly self-awareness, WW84 (like Aquaman before it) reverts to the mode of pre-2005 superhero movies built around campy set pieces and moronic plotting. Diana, for instance, comes across the plot’s instigator when she thwarts . . . a jewelry-store robbery in a shopping mall. A mall robbery? What is she doing at this crime scene in the first place? She’s supposed to be a goddess, not Paul Blart in a tiara.