Movie Review: Batman Unlimited - Monster Mayhem

Batman Unlimited - Monster Mayhem

Released last year, Monster Mayhem was the sequel to Animal Instincts and... it's improved by a fair bit. The voice acting, scripting and jokes are a lot better, and the movie does a better job at trying to make its multiple characters distinct, and I applaud them for that. The pacing is a lot better too, although there are certain places where the show felt rather off, it's definitely a vast improvement over Animal Instincts. 

Let's talk about the bad first. I get that the movie is light-hearted and it has a very fun tone, with the main plot being, for crying out loud, Joker and his goons "ruling" Gotham City by taking over all electronics, and then putting Solomon Grundy as police chief and Scarecrow as minister of economy. That's a laughing riot! What's not quite working is, well, just why the villains are actually parading themselves. Like in an actual parade. Clayface and Grundy I get, the former being a big sucker for showbiz and Grundy's just dumb, but Scarecrow and Silver Banshee actually go along with just waving around on floats?

Another bad one is the very, very long and weird scene where Batman is trying to hack Joker's computer, and then finds himself fighting Joker in a digital landscape, before summoning conspicuous-CGI Grimlock from Transformers and then beating up an army of digi-Jokers and then turning them into digi-Batman... and only this movie can make Batman riding on a robotic Tyrannosaurus rex feel boring. The fact that it ran for like forever was even more unforgiveable, especially since it keeps cutting away from the B-team fighting against the other antagonists. We also get some Team Batman fighting against mind-controlled Ace-the-Batcycle, Robin's bat mount, the Batwing and the Batmobile, but that wasn't as all-consuming as the robot fight scenes in Animal Instincts so I'll let that slide. Another scene that didn't need to happen was Gogo Shoto, and everything about him. He's a plot device, sure, I get it, but honestly why spend so much time early on with him? That felt like a waste since he kind of disappears near the end.

Red Robin and Arrow (they're not calling him Green Arrow here, are they? Huh) are very generic, too, still practically two-dimensional.

But for the most part? It was enjoyable, especially the first half. The last half was marred by the silly CGI T-Rex taking up ten minutes, and Joker's giant robot, while more entertaining than the random T-Rex, still felt procedural more than anything. The plot was a lot more tightly-woven than Animal Insticts, which was all lover the place, and the light-heartedness and zaniness of it all actually felt fun by jokes that are actually funny and a script that was... not quite there yet, but delivered enough jokes. Perhaps one of the biggest credit was using Joker as the main antagonist, because Joker's always a barrel of hilarity, but the biggest jokes come from Solomon Grundy. Hilariously stupid Solomon Grundy. Be it going on a joyride with Silver Banshee, or blushing from Joker's kiss, or insisting that the obviously-only-playing-along policemen obey Chief Grundy, or reading his televized script from his palm and still getting it wrong... Or, god, the pizza scene. I laughed my ass off while watching that.

The villains and heroes being more well defined helps a lot, too. Batman's still Batman, and like I mentioned above Red Robin and Arrow are still pretty identikit generic hero, but Nightwing (despite jobbing a lot of the fights he finds himself in) gets a pretty cool character moment in the house of mirrors facing off against Scarecrow and seeing his greatest fear as becoming like the mentor he hates... shame we don't really explore all that much, because the script basically goes 'oh, you got some troubles, don't you?' and Nightwing immediately just gets angry and starts smashing mirrors, but it does a good job at helping to distinguish him from the others.

Guest star Cyborg is introduced much elegantly than Green Arrow or Flash did in the previous movie, and while all DC veterans know who Cyborg is, we get to see what he can do in a standard hero-intro sequence and he's actually relevant to the plot, operating independently first before being hijacked by Joker, functioning as a secondary antagonist while being hacked, and later being relevant to the finale. 

And finally, the villains are all good fun. Joker and Solomon Grundy are the most hilarious, but the others are too. Silver Banshee is kind of a generic villain, but her voice acting and her utterly metal design makes her really interesting to see on-screen, and her weird buddy relationship with Grundy is unexpected yet hilarious. Clayface's voice acting is a bit m'eh compared to the rest, but his antics is pretty fun. Scarecrow gets the least screentime of the group, but even he isn't immune to great moments, with his moment with Nightwing being great, and his straight man antics compared to the other hammy ones is decent.

The action scenes are great, too! I find the big Joker fight at the end to be disappointing, as is the big superheroes-vs-vehicles thing to be repetitive, and I loathed the weird CGI dinosaur thing... but Batman versus Solomon Grundy was great with a pretty cool shot of Grundy. Green Arrow using balls to take out Silver Banshee when his bow is broken is another smooth action scene, too. And Clayface being all horror movie and shit on the game developer is a nice sequence.

Overall, still very flawed, but a huge, huge improvement over its predecessor. That said, though, I still don't think this series will honestly have long staying power if it doesn't improve in the next installment.