LEGO DC SuperHero Girls: Brain Drain 2017

Even though I had just complained about the difficulty in reviewing these DC SuperHero Girls movies because they are so similar in nature, I still decided to watch and review another one back to back. At least this time I was pleasantly surprised by the return of the LEGO style humor that was laced throughout the movie that helped keep my interest up more than several of the previous iterations. There were a handful of fun little callbacks to the history of DC superheroes, but there were still issues with too much stuff going on and an overreliance on newly introduced supervillain Lena Luthor. Of the four of these SuperHero Girls movies that I’ve watched, I would say that this has been my favorite so far, but they’re all right around the same level of mediocre, but good for young girl superhero fans.

The concept of this movie is actually relatively interesting as it takes the superheroes gone bad via mind control in a slightly different direction. Instead of just having a few of the heroes go bad and the rest of them have to deal with the baddies, the primary focus of the movie is that the three main characters were mind controlled over the course of a day and we get to follow them on the next day where they have to retrace their steps to find out what they did and uncover the villainous plan. There are still some moments of the main heroes fighting other mind controlled heroes, both in the opening sequence and towards the end of the movie, but the majority is about the missing day so to speak.

One slight curiosity about this movie in general is the question as to why the decision was made to have this be in LEGO animation rather than just sticking with the traditional animation. There weren’t really any moments in the movie where having it be LEGO really made any difference to the plot of the movie. There weren’t really any instances of building or rebuilding objects or vehicles outside of a single moment at the end where a hideout was transported through space and reforms into a giant spaceship. There are bits and pieces (pun intended) of LEGO style humor laced throughout the movie which does help overall, but that same kind of humor could have worked just as well in traditional animation.

As far as the characters go, we pretty much stick with the basics. Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Batgirl with various other characters throughout. We also get the return of Eclipso who was in the first movie Hero of the Year and she teams up with Lena Luthor who has been in pretty much every other movie. One disappointing factor about this movie is that while there is a big focus on a large number of female characters, they often feel like they don’t really have individual personalities. Instead, they are all just variations on basically the same personality. This is the fourth of these movies that have been featured on this site, and other than a few minor side characters that have unique character traits, there really is very little difference between the personalities of Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batgirl, and even Bumblebee. They’re heroic, positive, and focus on friendship and teamwork. Generally their differences are more focused on their powersets rather than their personalities.

Despite its overall flaws, it does succeed in what is the most important. It’s a short, fun movie with a large number of female characters in a superhero setting that doesn’t turn any of them into overly girly stereotypes. It’s still more or less what you would expect for an animated superhero movie aimed towards children. The humor is fun, the action is ok. Unlike some of the other SuperHero Girl movies there doesn’t seem to be an obvious moral or lesson to be learned through the course of the story but there doesn’t always have to be. It’s just a fun little romp that works especially well if you happen to have a young child that would be interested in watching it with you. I wouldn’t recommend this movie for any adult fans watching for their own enjoyment. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.