By Sam Bennett

The second installment of DC’s Wonder Woman series arrived on Christmas to HBO Max and theaters nationwide to very mixed reviews. And this review will be no different.

This movie certainly had its good moments, but those were marred by the poor parts. Whereas the original 2017 Wonder Woman movie had a good amount of great action sequences and good character moments, I found those to be severely lacking in this installment. There were a couple of sequences that were definitely meant to be more emotional and pull at your heartstrings, but I personally didn’t feel any of them, whether they had not been set up well or, I don’t consider this is a spoiler as it was revealed in all the marketing, it involved the returning Steve Trevor. There was not really any true character development by Diana herself, which is something I would certainly like to have seen. If anything, she went backwards from the last movie. There were also a fair few very common superhero movie character tropes that just seemed like lazy writing from Patty Jenkins and Co.

Okay, but if there’s not any good character work, at least there may be great action? For me, that’s also a no. For much of the movie, we don’t see any action at all from the title character. This was more Diana 1 than Wonder Woman 2 for the amount of fighting and action in this action superhero movie. This was especially disappointing, as I personally rather enjoy much of the action in the first Wonder Woman movie.

Along with these broad complaints, there are a few more specific parts that I would like to address without revealing any spoilers. In the first installment in the series, there were actual inspirational moments from Diana. She was a strong character that did good even in the face of the seemingly impossible. However, in WW84, I felt none of the inspiration when I walked out of the theater. And while the first scene was one of the most enjoyable, it seemed completely detached from the rest of the movie, and could have easily been taken out and could have helped the pacing out, since it felt extended and dragged out with the two and a half hour runtime. Final complaint: the CGI felt downgraded from the 2017 Wonder Woman, and the sound mixing could have been improved in some part.

Now for the good, and there is really nowhere else to begin besides the performance of Chris Pine. While his character may not have been as good as the first movie, Pine still gives a great performance and is still fun and charismatic. The rest of the cast also appears to be doing their best with the script they were given, besides a bit of overacting from Pedro Pascal. As expected, the Hans Zimmer score is great. There were a few shots that I thought were very good. As you can see, I found many more negatives than positives for this movie. Overall, a disappointment as the start of the streaming era of cinema.

Final Rating: 5/10