League of Super-Pets 2022

I was all set to continue my DC catch up by watching Shazam: Fury of the Gods on HBO Max that I had saved on my list for the longest time. And yet, when I went to select the movie, the only option was to watch the trailer and it wasn’t available to watch on there anymore. So I decided to go back a little bit further and watch the only other theatrically released DC movie aside from the latest Superman that I hadn’t seen yet which was this animated League of Super-Pets featuring the Rock and Kevin Hart voicing Krypto and Ace. Krypto has been a thing for quite a while as well as Ace, though neither had been heavily featured in many mainstream Superman or Batman projects until the latest Superman movie. I was expecting a rather mediocre made-for-kids-esque movie and for the most part, that’s what I got. It did get a few laughs out of me, but it was way too formulaic to impress me much.

One of the oddest things about this movie was how much the meta humor was focused on referencing Marvel superheroes rather than other DC lore, from Iron Man to Gambit to Thor and they even threw in a PAW Patrol reference. Most of the rest of the humor was fun enough, especially when it was hanging a hat on the absurdity of super powered pets, especially the villainous team of guinea pigs. The Rock did a decent job of voicing Krypto as a very naive dog version of Superman complete with his alter-ego Bark Kent that the other animals completely see past, though it would have been a nice touch to have the other dogs recognize him via smell rather than just see past the glasses disguise. The rest of the human Justice League were interesting choices, especially as this was made right in the middle of the DCEU and yet there was zero connection to the live action movies. In fact, while Aquaman bore a very slight resemblance to Jason Momoa, he was based more on the comics version where he had a hook hand, and it was a very interesting choice for them to go with Jessica Cruz as their Green Lantern even though she was never called out by name during the entire movie. The Flash also eschewed the extraneous lightning effects used by the live action Flash in the movies.

The basic outline of the movie is that Krypto is an anti-social loner who has never had any friends outside of Superman and is worried that he is about to lose Superman to Lois Lane. Meanwhile, Ace and the other eventual Super-Pets are a group of animals that have spent the long game in a shelter where they are constantly overlooked in favor of cute kittens and have dreams of escaping and living on a farm upstate, while Lulu is a hairless guinea pig that was liberated from Lex Luthor’s animal testing lab who believes she is rightfully Lex’s pet and wants to dominate the world and return to his side. Ace has the typical sad backstory that’s revealed shortly before the climax where he saved his owner’s toddler from falling down the stairs by grabbing her by the arm which caused the parents to give him away for biting. And yet, he still has unconditional love for them despite being in his situation because of their decision. Lex gets some orange Kryptonite which Lulu knows only works on pets which gives them all various super powers and Lulu then goes to liberate the other Lex-corp guinea pigs who were donated to a school and gives them all a wide variety of super powers to act as her minions and uses them to capture the Justice League.

The rest of the movie is more or less cookie-cutter with the added wrinkle that Krypto loses his powers by eating a cube of cheese laced with green kryptonite and has to rely on the newly-powered shelter pets which include a near-sighted tortoise with super speed, a squirrel with lightning power, a pot-bellied pig with the ability to change her size, and Ace with invulnerability and increased-but-not-Superman-level strength. Krypto is forced to work with them while they struggle to learn how to use their powers and eventually become friends and triumph at the end, with the bonus super happy ending where each of them as well as a couple of the villain guinea pigs get doled out to all of the Justice League, though one of those choices was a bit of an annoyance as they named the squirrel Chip and he was given to the Green Lantern at the end as a reference to Ch’p which is a squirrel-like alien Green Lantern.

Overall, it’s not a bad movie by any means. The cast all do their job well and the action scenes were fun and laced with a fair amount of humor. But what were supposed to be the touching elements were so cliched and rushed that they really lost their effectiveness. The shelter pets were incompetent until they were given a pep talk and a pair of glasses, but it was still mainly due to the passing of the kryptonite that gave Krypto back his powers that allowed them to win against Lulu and the guinea pigs. There were a handful of fun jokes like the subtle gag in the feed underneath Lex in the news footage that said “rich person actually goes to jail”, and the more blatant joke of the cute kitten who gains the power to manifest deadly munitions like grenades and rockets as they go after the Super-Pets. It’s not the worst way to spend a couple hours, but it’s not really worth your time unless you’ve got a kid that will enjoy it alongside you, and it didn’t even hold my 4 year old’s interest except for a couple brief scenes. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.