‘Justice League’ Review Roundup: Rotten Tomatoes Refuses To Post Score, Initial Reviews Poor

Justice League will be released in theaters on Friday, Nov. 17, but Rottentomatoes is refusing to share the film’s tomatometer score. Delving deeper, ticket seller Fandango owns Rotten Tomatoes, and Warner Bros., the film’s distributor, also has an ownership stake in Fandango. Justice League received some poor early reviews, and the site’s refusal to release any reviews or scores is evidence that the initial reviews were not flukes. Flixster, a social movie app, does have access to the tomatometer score, and shared that the film only earned a 48%. While there is no proven correlation between a poor score and a box office failure, the jury is still out on Justice League.

The DC comic film stars Ben Affleck as Batman, Henry Cavill as Superman, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, Ezra Miller as the Flash, Jason Momoa as Aquaman, and Ray Fisher as Cyborg. Together the group must team up to destroy the evil Steppenwolf. The film was directed by Zack Snyder and written by Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon.

JUSTICE LEAGUE REVIEW ROUNDUP

“It’s rather staggering, how pretty much nothing in the film works, not the semi-reliable old stuff, and certainly not all the new junk they’ve crammed in. Justice League sweatily wants to be both an epic and a romp, but hasn’t the patience to truly be either. It’s rote and perfunctory and bland, as if burped out by some tired algorithm. How could this be the movie that got made in the end, after all that lead-up? Perhaps the Justice League franchise really has been rotten from the start, experiencing not evolution but entropy, with Wonder Woman standing as an anomalous glimmer of false hope. I could be projecting, but boy does poor Gal Gadot look so sad in Justice League, watching this lumbering and witless movie lay waste to the nice thing she just got finished making. It really is a shame. What a dumb irony, to end this movie, of all movies, on a note of bitter injustice like that.”
–Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

“In superhero movies, sheer lively deliver-the-goods competence can be a quality you’re grateful for — or one that seems awesomely innocuous. In “Justice League,” it’s a little of both. The film is the definition of an adequate high-spirited studio lark: no more, no less. If fans get excited about it, that may mostly be because they’re excited about getting excited. Yet the movie is no cheat. It’s a tasty franchise delivery system that kicks a certain series back into gear… Justice League, the latest link of Tinkertoy in the DC Comics universe, has been conceived, in each and every frame, to correct the sins of Batman v Superman. It’s not just a sequel — it’s an act of franchise penance. The movie, which gathers up half a dozen comic-book immortals and lets them butt heads on their way to kicking ass, is never messy or bombastic. It’s light and clean and simple (at times almost too simple), with razory repartee and combat duels that make a point of not going on for too long.”
–Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“Where to lay the blame for Justice League’s just OK-ness? The movie is a jumbo-sized blur — not terrible, just underwhelming even amid its desperation to impress us — but that’s probably neither Snyder’s fault nor Whedon’s. Each superhero’s personality emerges distinctly, as if accompanied by a checkmark: Affleck’s Batman stomps around looking suitably morose and pissed off. Momoa’s Aquaman is just a bundle of wounded male pride, with stupendous pectorals. There’s lots of action, elaborately staged in that now business-as-usual CGI way: You won’t go home hungry to see superheroes flying around boldly before being flung to Earth, smote by Steppenwolf’s fists of fury. In fact, you will have seen enough of that to last you a dozen lifetimes. It’s just so damn hard to care about the story.”
–Stephanie Zacharek, Time Magazine

“Justice League, the newest DC Comics superhero jam directed by Zack Snyder, is looser, goosier and certainly more watchable than the last one. The bar could scarcely have been lower given that the previous movie, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, was such an interminable slog. The superhero and villain dynamic is much the same (slayers going to slay, etc.), but there are a few fresh faces now and Wonder Woman has more to do than play backup. The story is a confusion of noise, visual clutter and murderous digital gnats, but every so often a glimmer of life flickers through.”
–Manohla Dargis, New York Times