DC LEAGUE OF SUPER-PETS

Never mind the fact that the film looks like a Saturday morning cartoon, even as an innocuous palate cleanser amid bigger superhero movies DC League of Super-Pets fails miserably.

By now nobody knows what exactly DC Films is trying to do with their superhero movies. Do they wanna go dark? Do they wanna imitate the successful Marvel model? Or do they wanna keep on trying stuff and see what sticks? DC League of Super-Pets seems to suggest the latter.

The picture offers a predictable hero versus super-villain story, only this time from the point of view of Krypto, the dog of Superman, who suddenly loses all his powers and now has to rely on the help of an assortment of other animals to prevent bald guinea pig Lulu from taking over the universe.

Sounds like a bonkers, oddly misguided, immediately disposable piece of animation that only the youngest kids might enjoy? You’d be correct, as DC League of Super-Pets has preciously little going for it. There are no witty gags, no smart genre subversions, nothing that remotely resembles originality.

Which is probably just fine for voice actors Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Kate McKinnon, who happily cashed their cheque to phone in their bland performances, amid decent animation that nevertheless more resembles Saturday afternoon cartoons than it does the ground-breaking Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.

So is there any point to DC League of Super-Pets? Not really. Even as an innocuous palate cleanser the film fails so badly your wonder why the film got greenlit in the first place.

release: 2022

director: Jared Stern

starring: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Kate McKinnon, John Krasinski