Wonder Woman 1984

Though DC’s film universe has mostly moved on from the dark and gritty Zack Snyder-led era (finding its footing instead in fun lighter movies or standalone projects, both looser with the continuity), the franchise has kept intact the things most agree the so-called “Snyderverse” got right. The most obvious of which is its Wonder Woman, impeccably brought to life by Gal Gadot, and whose initial picture was easily the best DC universe movie, a lone light in that dark age. Sadly, the promise of that first feature evaporates pretty quickly in this sequel, which seems to be overcompensating in look and tone for the dark era that spawned it, and yet despite its opposite aesthetic is every bit as bad a film as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Maybe even worse, in fact. I’ll say this much for BvS: it had an ambitious and clear vision, and failed because it juggled too many plots and subplots. Wonder Woman 1984 is an overstretched, confused movie with no handle on what it wants to be. All at once, it tries to be a modern superhero blockbuster, a strange and goofy Silver Age comics story, an 80s nostalgia fest, an 80s parody, a straight-up middling 80s comedy, a fable-cum-PSA about everyday moral issues, a treatise about bigger issues, and several more things. None done particularly well, and all held together by a story that would barely hold together if the film just picked one of these elements and went with it. 

That story finds our Amazon hero—alias Diana Prince—in the titular mid-80s, appraising artifacts for the Smithsonian by day, saving the day at her local mall by night. In her day job, she comes across a rare amulet that appears to grant wishes…at a price. In her hero capacity, she must stop shady tycoon Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) from using the amulet’s power to take over the world. Also, her deceased lover Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) somehow reappears in her life.

The film's barebones plot pitch has the makings of a silly and zany old school comics story, which could have made for a very different and refreshingly original superhero film if explored the right way. The picture itself, however, makes of this a narrative that's convoluted and weird in all the wrong ways, and makes matters worse by burying it under a mound of undercooked subplot points. There are around a dozen irrelevant threads that feel like the screenwriters either got bored with them but forgot to cut them from the script, or couldn’t decide whether they should be a substantial subplot or merely a background element or gag and sloppily split the difference by having them all just sit there, adding minutes to the runtime but not going anywhere. The film’s release on streaming is almost a blessing for the audience, for they can rewind to try to make some sense of what's happening. But, it’s not really worth it, because within the muddle, the standard superhero stuff is nothing to write home about.

It's too bad, because the cast is quite apparently so much better than this movie, and do what they can. Pascal and Kristen Wiig aren’t very good villains—in fact, they’re totally out of their depth when the villainous schemes come to fruition (and despite the promotional materials centering him as such, Pascal is less an imitation of the outgoing President than a general sleazy corporate 80s trope). But they at least likably chew the scenery early in the movie, and even a handful of times after everything goes south. And Pine and Gadot carry some scenes they share superbly, as does Gadot on her own. Whether in the heat of battle, giving a triumphant speech, or in her quieter moments, she’s so earnest and sincere that she at times invites comparison to Christopher Reeve’s still-immaculate performance as Superman.

Unfortunately, Wonder Woman 1984 is more like the later Reeve Superman sequels than the good ones remembered fondly today. And while Superman III and IV were so insubstantial that Reeve’s charm almost made them mildly watchable, this movie is so bloated that even if it were possible, it's doubtful that even the combined efforts of Reeve and Gadot would be able to get a handle on it. I say it begrudgingly, but this is one of the worst DC movies yet.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

2006 seems pretty quaint now, doesn’t it? Back then, YouTube and social media were in their infancy, pointing out George W. Bush’s grammatical goofs was considered strong satire, and the American public was still prone to moral outrage about explicit content in pop culture.

Obviously, things have changed. 14 years ago, Sacha Baron Cohen‘s antics in the first Borat could legitimately shock people, and the backwards prejudices he revealed in some of his subjects might have truly stunned more progressive-minded viewers. But his simpleton Kazakh reporter finds himself traversing a much different America in this sequel, fully titled Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

The conceit (cover story) this time is that Borat’s first film ruined his home country’s reputation. To restore it and curry favor with the United States, Borat is sent back to America on a mission to offer his teenage daughter (Maria Bakalova) as a gift to the U.S. President. There’s more plot than there needs to be (it is merely a setup, after all), and frankly way too many scripted scenes. Aside from the closing moments—turning some of the gags about the film's fake Kazakhstan back on Americans—these are almost uniformly unfunny.

When the movie gets to what Baron Cohen is known for—that is, using his absurd character to trick real unsuspecting public figures and civilians into revealing interviews and off-the-wall stunts—he still manages to mine a few gold nuggets. There’s one “Holy shit!” sequence you might have heard about involving a certain former big city mayor that’s as uncomfortable and disgusting as it sounds (and hilarious). Another unexpected standout has one interviewee react to Borat’s exaggerated bigotry with genuine compassion, in a moment that strums the viewer’s heartstrings just the tiniest bit. And quite a few scenes where Baron Cohen or Bakalova get their subjects to say or do something outrageous, or simply document reactions to their own bad behavior, are very funny.

Others, aren’t. Simply put, vulgarity that might have shocked us into laughing back in ’06 doesn’t seem so edgy or original in an era where cruel trolling pranks and dirty cringe humor are readily accessible on the phone in your pocket. There’s also no big brazen moment that’s so daring, dangerous, and transcendently hysterical, like the naked hotel fight in the first film or the cage fighting scene in Brüno. Even a particularly gross-out scene that’s arguably trying to continue that legacy seems pretty passé.

More worrisome, though, are the failures that are not Baron Cohen’s fault. These days, the public doesn’t need much goading to reveal the ignorance and ugliness hiding underneath the surface; it’s right there on the news or going viral on the regular, and its propagators (including no less than the freaking President) aren’t shy or ashamed about it. So when Borat, say, “tricks” an anti-mask rally full of far-right gun nuts and conspiracy believers into singing about killing Democrats and journalists, it frankly doesn’t sound much different from their regular rhetoric. Baron Cohen clearly aimed to mock them, but the stunt reveals little those who even cursorily watch the news don’t know already, and he kind of just bounces off the bigots instead of righteously humiliating them. This is an unfortunate recurring obstacle, that his more partisan targets are inured to his schtick because they’ve gone so far off the deep end themselves.

Baron Cohen never drops the façade onscreen, but has struck a much more serious tone out of character in the news lately. One can sort of read his for-real commentary as a tacit admission that the world has reached a point beyond even his gutsy high-wire methods. In a way, though, that arguably still gives Borat Subsequent Moviefilm value as a cultural artifact. Not so much as a daring and revealing work of satire, but as a measurement of how far society has regressed that something that was so edgy and so absurd in 2006 isn't nearly absurd enough to take on reality in 2020.