Thursday, October 13, 2011

WONDER WOMAN: Amazonian Fail

  Well, this is as bad as it looks and as you’ve heard.  Wonder Woman has no secret identity, but is the big boss of a company that manufactures Wonder Woman merchandise and everyone knows she’s a superhero.  Wonder Woman is a mixed up character.  She doesn’t want to make an action figure who sells her “tits and ass” as she puts it, but in the next scene not only does she wear the outfit, but says to some dude who won’t let her in a door, “Do you like my outfit?  It opens doors for me.”  Let’s not also forget that Diana Themyscira (the bosslady of this company) also designed this outfit.  And Adrianne Palicki is just plain horrible in this.  The only time she’s actually comfortable is when she’s playing another character named Diana Prince which makes no sense if she’s already Wonder Woman and Diana Themyscira.  She plays Wonder Woman as an angry bitch and totally unlikable.  I was kind of okay with that in the Nathan Fillion Wonder Woman because she was a consistent character, but this was a total missed mark because it seems like a full-on identity crisis—especially so for someone concerned about image.  Perhaps it was just the way it was performed, but it came off all wrong.   But to give an actor three roles to play may be a bit much at once especially when none of the characters are clearly thought out.

  Then there’s the action stuff.   It’s hit and miss.  The action is sped up sometimes and looks about as cheesey as the Six Million Dollar Man bionic sound, but we’re not supposed to think it’s kitsch. Then there’s the bracelets and bullets stuff which actually looked a little cool, but maybe after so much lameness that it just came off as the only awesome thing in the entire run.   But then there’s some weird stuff.  There’s a moment during the action where she graphically impales a security guard in the throat with a metal pipe.  Albeit he was shooting at her, but that’s kind of his job as an armed guard.  It’s not like he was a goon or a henchman.   In the Wonder Woman 2009 cartoon, that might be acceptable because that Wonder Woman was new to the way things go, but this one is supposed to be more responsible and have a greater understanding of not just killing random working class dudes.

It’s either that David E. Kelley hated the fact that this could’ve been his cash cow and tried to sabotage it or he really doesn’t know anything about how to make a show like this work.  I’ve never seen his shows, but I was a huge fan of Lake Placid.  But it seems that anything that carries with it so much weight and history either calls for complete and utter faithfulness to the source material or full-on re-envisioning.  Sometimes it hits, but this fails on 95% of its fronts.

In the meantime, while Hollywood tries to figure things out, this is the only Wonder Woman that matters until a new one comes along.



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