<Review by: Sailesh Ghelani>

Directed by Patty Jenkins. Starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, Robin Wright

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes

A messy script, inconsistent editing, cheap-looking CGI and a generally lazy plot line make this a shadow of a sequel to the first Wonder Woman film.

In my review for the first film – which I loved – I had said, ‘She’ll save the DC Universe if they let her’. Alas, I doubt anything can save DC super heroes now.

WW84 looks like it was made in a hurry, on a low budget and with a flimsy script. An ancient stone that grants infinite wishes to anyone and everyone is the plot device that not only leads to chaos on Earth but also through this terribly crafted movie. There’s plenty that doesn’t make sense and when you combine that with shoddy CGI and formula super heroes in bad make-up, Wonder Woman 1984 turns out to be one of the worst DC films I’ve seen.

So Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) wants the wishing stone so that he can truly be the oil magnate he’s fraudulently promoting himself as. He gets it easily and then turns himself into a wishing stone. But not before Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) and museum colleague Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) have their wishes. Diana wants her Steve (Chris Pine) back and Barbara wants to be like Diana (not realising she’s Wonder Woman).

Steve Trevor comes back but in the body of some random handsome guy. But for our sake, we see Chris Pine when everyone else in the film only see the random guy. Why this is the case is unclear and confusing. Also, random guy approaches Diana at a party and she asks why he keeps following her. But till that point we haven’t seen him following her at all. In a film with wishes causing heart attacks and nuclear crises, would it have been beyond belief to just have Steve come back in his own body?

Most of the second half barely sees Wonder Woman, which wouldn’t be so bad if the script were engaging enough. But the love affair between her and Steve is flat and boring.

Barbara Minerva’s character is reminiscent of several other super hero villains who are geeky and weak but want to be the popular and powerful people they idolise and envy. Yet another sloppy piece of scripting in a film so lazy they can’t even get the CGI to make Wonder Woman jump seamlessly.

So Diana works at a museum but then she waltzes into an air base with a keycard and offers up any plane Steve wants to fly them about. I don’t understand how she has this access. It’s never explained.

The wishes get out of hand and so does the motivation of the villain. Things get dull and ridiculous through most of the second half. The interesting flashback to Diana as a little girl taking part in a right-of-passage challenge on the Amazon island was the only interesting sequence in the film.

Senseless, meaningless and poorly crafted, WW84 doesn’t even get the nostalgia right. Thor: Ragnarok and most other Marvel films win hands down on this front.

And the clincher at the end is when Minerva turns into the ‘Cheetah’ that looks more like a pussycat from the Broadway show CATS. The make-up is terrible and so is the CGI action sequence. That coupled with a bland villain made even more vanilla by Pedro Pascal (who else felt utterly crestfallen when he took off his helmet in The Mandalorian?)

Oh and the end-credits scene with Lynda Carter (who played the original Wonder Woman in the TV series from the 70s) was so trashy and grimace-worthy that it’s probably the worst end-credits scene in the history of them.