Wonder Woman 1984

Our Review

The first Wonder Woman earned goodwill the old way, by being good. The sequel spends all of it. Wonder Woman 1984 opens with a thrilling Amazon games prologue that promises big cheerful adventure, then settles into 151 minutes of plot that feels like a first draft nobody interrogated. Diana is moping through 1984, Steve Trevor is resurrected into another man’s body (a device the film handles so carelessly it borders on gross), an oily infomercial salesman named Maxwell Lord misuses a wish granting stone, and Kristen Wiig’s shy archaeologist gets a makeover arc that turns her into a snarling CGI cheetah for roughly four minutes.

Wiig is the best actor here and she gets the worst material. The action is cartoonish in the wrong way, with a truck chase on ropes that looks like a TV movie, the moral arrives via a worldwide broadcast pep talk, and the ending resolves by simply hugging the villain’s trauma until he gives up. Pascal devours scenery with a smirk and the mall scene is cute. That is the full list of compliments.

Gadot still glows whenever the script lets her be warm, but the whole machine around her is slack and silly where the first film was sturdy. Our score: 4/10. Revisit the first one instead.