Wonder Woman **½ (2017, Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright, Danny Huston, David Thewlis) – Movie Review

Wonder Woman has two aces in its hand – Gal Gadot as made-from-clay amazon goddess Diana and Chris Pine as World War One US spy Steve Trevor – but two aces don’t necessarily make a winning hand.

All the other roles urgently need recasting and re-writing. There’s nothing good to say about Connie Nielsen’s Hippolyta, Robin Wright’s Antiope, Danny Huston’s Nazi villain Ludendorff, David Thewlis’s peculiar Brit Sir Patrick, Saïd Taghmaoui’s Arabic stereotype Sameer, Ewen Bremner’s Scots stereotype Charlie, or Eugene Brave Rock’s Chief. It’s not the actors’ fault. They are either miscast, under-directed, under-used, mis-used, or simply neglected or side-lined by the script.

As the movie takes great pains to try to be character based, this is a big problem. I don’t know why it tries to be character based. Presumably the idea is to add depth, but it just adds running time to a way over-long, baggy movie.

Look, let’s be honest, we’re just here to check out Wonder Woman in her glorious prime and thrill to the comic book action. And, yes, to be fair, you can do both of these things here. While Gadot provides the looks and the super-heroine action, Pine provides the laughs. They make an excellent team, a nice bit of yin and yang. Gadot is great, a bit of a marvel really, or should that be a bit of a DC (I’m going for Deliciously Charming and Decidedly Challenging), and it’s Pine’s best stuff since the first Star Trek reboot (though he recently impressed in 2016’s Hell or High Water).

I don’t want o go on too much about this, but Gadot is worth her weight in gold. Her mix of beauty pageant looks and Israel army brawn, plus obvious charm, wit and intelligence, are so rare that… what? That she is Wonder Woman. She’s brilliant in the action, and tosses off the one-liners she’s given as winners. If only she had been given more here! But Pine gets most of the funny stuff. Luckily, he can turn a mildly amusing gag into a big laugh. Is he average of the men from where he comes from? No, above average!

Talking of funny stuff, there’s far too much of it, most of it quite drossy. Lucy Davis gives an excruciatingly awful turn as Etta, a middle-aged English woman who thinks she is funny. Bremner is dreadful too. The English and Scots should sue the writers for defamation. Thewlis’s villain is off key, just flat. Some other, more extravagant actor might, just might have pulled it off. On the Hitchcock principle that a movie is only as good as its villain, this is a very moderate movie indeed.

The funny stuff and the action stuff seem to belong to different movies, and simply don’t cohere into one satisfying film, like say the similarly-toned Guardians of the Galaxy, where the humour is organic to the characters and their various predicaments. Along with a major cull of the actors, a change of period from the way-too-serious First World War setting, and a change of tone from the portentous start on the all-girls’ planet to a more campy, fun one would be great for the sequel. And could we shut down the music just once in a while and turn down the volume, and let the film lead the excitement, not a desperately laid-on soundtrack pounding mercilessly just in case we aren’t enjoying ourselves.

The daft start on the Amazons’ planet reminded me of the awful start of the Marlon Brando Superman (1978), just hilariously pretentious and no fun at all, just there to clumsily set up the super-hero character and background. At least the film gets an actual joke out of Wonder Woman’s genesis as created by Zeus out of clay, putting the comic back in comic book.

From the trailers, I was hoping for something a whole lot more serious than this movie, though, again to be fair, the action is very lusty and feisty, quite hard and violent. It doesn’t hold back, so it is quite satisfying, and there is a lot of it.

Pine obliges his female fans, which are the majority of the audience, by taking most of his clothes off in a gratuitous bathing sequence, which admittedly is as amusing as it is sexy. Oddly though, Gadot doesn’t equally oblige, though her scanty outfits are always easy on the eye. Wonder Woman’s idea of feminism is, if you’ve got it, flaunt it, and if you’ve got a big sword, use it.

I love Gadot’s quizzical, disapproving look. Everything seems to perplex her about man’s behaviour. It’s giving her an enormous frown line between her eyes, the only line on her face, but it is worth it. Wonder Woman is going to end up like Lady Bracknell!

Another test of movies of course is if your bum starts to ache. This was happening around half an hour left of the movie. Admittedly, the Odeon Leicester Square stalls seats are surprising uncomfortable for 141 minutes, but you should not be getting restless, shifting in your seat.

Even so however, with Gadot and Pine, ultimately Wonder Woman is better than you might expect, maybe even better than it deserves to be.

With an an outsize hit on its hands, Warner Bros has set Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman 2 for release on 13 December 2019.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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