By Jerry Roberts

I think I saw these guys at my last sci-fi convention.

It lasts about 80 minutes but knock off about 45 minutes and you’d have the makings for a pretty laughable fan film. Its laughable anyway but past the 20 minute mark it has already become insufferable.

Before X-Men and Spiderman revived confidence in the genre of live action comic book adaptations there was an entire minefield of bad superhero movies from labored productions like The Punisher, Judge Dredd, Barb Wire, Howard the Duck, Captain America (all incarnations) and the infamous Fantastic Four movie (a movie so bad it now lies buried in bootleg hell). So too is the fate of Justice League of America, a failed, never aired television pilot, which can, at best, be described as “trite”.

Faltering even on the basic concept level, Justice League of America doesn’t so much choose it’s heroes but offers whichever copywrited characters the network could afford. Here, instead of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman we get a quintet of second-rate do-gooders whose personalities could be used as spackel. We get Flash, The Atom, Fire, Ice and Martian Manhunter (played more or less indifferently by M*A*S*H’s David Ogden Steirs) the founder of the group who helpfully points out that “Mars is very hot”.

The rest of the cast includes a group of pretty faces not hired from a theater troup so much as a modeling agency (there is a thanks to a modeling agency in the credits, that’s how I know this). But isn’t it interesting that they were hired for their pretty faces then had them hidden under foam-rubber masks.

The JLA’s bonding in the movie is something of a mystery to us since they seem to spend a good amount of time arguing with one another. They pause just long enough to get in a fist-fight and point out what we in the audience figured out ten minutes ago. Their threat (besides the production itself) is the Weather Man. I kid you not, they are saving the world from a guy who wants to destroy the world with cloudy weather! And if you think that calling a villain The Weather Man is stupid concider that he was previously called The Weather Wizard.

This would be dismissible were it not for a two-fisted performance by Miguel Ferrier, an actor who could turn a performance as Tony the Tiger into a ferocious tour de force. He does his dead-level best but it’s hard to describe the threat of global hard rain with any serious conviction. I was a little disappointed that he didn’t come equipped with an appropriately goofy costume and underground (I was imagining a guy with the Doppler radar symbol on his tights in his lair with a huge altar to Willard Scott). Wouldn’t it have been fun if his evil plan was to force the entire world to watch The Weather Channel 24/7 until they were bored into a coma? The movie isn’t quite that creative. It’s all direct-to-video level production that apparently wasn’t even good enough for direct-to-video. Now that's bad!!