Superman/Batman: Public Enemies:
This would be the weekest DCU offering yet if not for the top-notch voice work. Brown, Conroy, Daly, and Pounder all reprise their roles.
As far as plot, there isn't much of one; as far as script, it's corny as hell and poorly suited to the calibre of the cast.
And speaking of the cast...with the exception of the three principals (Brown in particular really hits it out of the park; he gets a complete character arc from smug, scheming Lex to fucking crazy supervillain Lex), they're all totally underutilized. I saw in the credits that Jennifer Hale played Starfire, but I can't remember Starfire actually saying anything. Alan Oppenheimer gets a neat cameo as Alfred, but is only in it for a minute. Levar Burton gave a very nice
interview a few weeks back about playing Black Lightning, which was about 100 times as many words as he actually spoke in the role.
The problem is that the movie is basically one long fight scene, crammed full of whatever characters they thought would be cool to include, whether or not they're used in any meaningful way or even make sense in the story. (Superman actually says, in dialogue, that it makes absolutely no sense for Mongul to be there.)
I haven't read the source material, but I have a hunch the dialogue's pretty true to it. Berkowitz (who has the screenplay credit) has written perfectly good DCAU stuff in the past, so I'm assuming the utterly hammy one-liners are Jeph Loeb's. They'd work all right coming out of Adam West's mouth, or Diedrich Bader's, but they're all wrong for the Kevin Conroy Batman.
All in all, a disappointment with some real potential and some neat fight scenes.
My ranking of the DCU movies to date: New Frontier > Gotham Knight > Wonder Woman = Green Lantern > Public Enemies > Doomsday.
Next up is a Crisis on Two Earths adaptation by Dwayne McDuffie, based on a story he'd planned for JLU. I have much higher hopes for it.
