Lego DC Comics Super Heroes: Justice League vs. Bizarro League 2015

Starting my unintentional batch of superhero movies intended for younger audiences with the latest home video Lego movie release. There’s been a small handful of these Lego home video releases, though many of them are extremely short. Even this one clocks in at just under an hour. If you’re familiar with the Lego brand of entertainment outside of just the Lego movie then you know that it is generally filled with a large number of rapid fire gags and jokes and Bizarro League is no different. It is a bit of a misnomer though, as the entire “vs” aspect of the movie is over within just a few minutes and instead the two groups spend most of their time working together to fight Darkseid. It’s by no means a great film that you should go seek out immediately, but if you have kids of your own, this is a great way to spend an hour together and I bet you will spend quite a bit of it laughing your minifig head off. There’s even a bit of a message buried under all the laughs.

The movie basically centers around Bizarro who seems to have been recently created, though we thankfully skip his origin story and just get to see him “saving” a group of children from a giant tentacle creature, aka an octopus merry-go-round. To try and keep him from “saving” the citizens of Metropolis to death, Superman finds a bizarro cube planet with weird physics and a bunch of orange crystals where Bizarro can live and create a new Metropolis to call home without causing trouble in the real Metropolis. Flash forward a bit into the future where the Lego Justice League is fighting Gorilla Grodd and a few other notable villains with their new recruits Cyborg and Green Lantern, specifically Guy Gardner. It was actually nice to see Guy Gardner represented as the Green Lantern instead of the typical Hal Jordan or occasional John Stewart, though he had a really nerdy looking haircut even by Lego standards. There’s even a brief appearance by Plastic Man who also rarely shows up, though he disappears once the main plot comes into play. Bizarro comes back and raids Lex Luthor’s personal villain lair to steal the ray that created Bizarro from Superman in the first place and uses it on the members of the Justice League that came to stop him: Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Batman, and Green Lantern, but instead of fighting they run off back to his bizarro planet to fight off Darkseid who is destroying Bizarro’s Metropolis by collecting all of the weird crystals.

Beneath all of the jokes, the best children’s entertainment really does have a good moral to the story, especially if it’s one that isn’t just fully explained at the end, but is shown more subtly throughout the film. Here, there is a very strong moral lesson of accepting people who are different from you, even when they make mistakes. Lego Superman sent Bizarro away in order to help protect Metropolis, but there was also an element of him being embarrassed by this mistake-ridden creature that looks just like him. Throughout the battles there are several moments where the Justice League realizes that they need to work with the Bizarro League in order to accomplish their goals instead of pushing them off to the side and trivializing their worth. There’s also a running gag with Batman’s internal monologue of not trusting Superman because he is an alien with unclear motives. One of the best gags is the first one where Superman is giving a speech to the rest of the Justice League and Batman turns around and has a close up with his internal monologue discussing his secret lead box that has a stash of Kryptonite in it. And as soon as Batman opens up the box to reveal it to the audience, Superman in the background immediately falls prone to the floor. In the end, Batman obviously does come to trust Superman and work together with him.

The voice cast is well done, though it’s an odd choice to have Deidrich Bader return to voice Guy Gardner when he had previously voiced Batman quite well for the series Batman: The Brave and the Bold. The rest of the cast are generally voice actor mainstays that work out as well as you would expect. The animation isn’t the full-on 100% Lego effects the way that the Lego Movie was, but it’s mostly Lego with a handful of cheats for the explosions and some other special effects. Not enough to take away from the movie, but it was there nonetheless. The fight scenes were very family friendly, with Darkseid’s drone shooting tickle rays and Green Lantern projecting giant chickens due to the effects of the bizarro planet, but they were still fun to watch. Again, it very much caters to a younger audience, but the message it puts forth is a good one and the humor included can be appreciated by anyone young and old. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.