I’m sure there are some hardcore gay comics less homoerotic than Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman, so the prospect of seeing it as a cartoon was irresistible. While Warner Premiere ostensibly intends their latest line of animated DC Comics adaptations for “adults” (i.e. men in their twenties and thirties with the discretionary income to waste it on a Blu-Ray of a poorly illustrated cartoon), these films are timed for eventual Cartoon Network airing–seventy minutes or less.
And Superman/Batman: Public Enemies is just as gloriously homoerotic as an animated movie as it was as a comic book. It’s a shame there’s no make-out scene.
The comic book also directly equated George W. Bush to a homicidal, drug-addicted maniac. Maybe the movie doesn’t go as far–Clancy Brown sounds way too smart–but it comes close. It’s something to see something geared, essentially, towards kids portray the President of the United States as a power mad psychopath, out to ruin the world for his own profit. It’s a little problematic (there’s no Dick Cheney analog in the movie), but it’s something.
Between the politics and the super-gay superheroes, the countless defects are almost forgotten. But not really.
Based on Ed McGuinness’s art, Public Enemies looks cheaper than an advertisement for Hostess fruit pies on afternoon television. It’s got some awful CG, but the composition is generally all right.
Brown is good, Tim Daly is good–Kevin Conroy is lost.
It’s a decent conversation piece, not a movie.
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CREDITS
Directed by Sam Liu; screenplay by Stan Berkowitz, based on a comic book by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness and characters created by Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, C.C. Beck and Bob Kane; edited by Margaret Hou; music by Christopher Drake; produced by Bobbie Page; released by Warner Premiere.
Starring Clancy Brown (Lex Luthor), Kevin Conroy (Batman), Tim Daly (Superman), Allison Mack (Power Girl), John C. McGinley (Metallo), Xander Berkeley (Captain Atom), LeVar Burton (Black Lightning), Ricardo Chavira (Major Force), Jerry O’Connell (Captain Marvel), Robert Patrick (Hawkman) and CCH Pounder (Amanda Waller).
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