Skewering the superhero

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This article was published 28/07/2018 (2670 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The DC extended universe gets even more extended with this new animated comedy-adventure, aimed at kids — sort of — and based on the long-running Cartoon Network series about Robin the Boy Wonder and his Teen Titans crew.

With zany humour, catchy musical numbers and bright, loud, superfast animation, Teen Titans Go! still remains less than the sum of all its jokes.

Robin (Scott Menville) is happy fighting evil with Cyborg, Starfire, Raven and Beast Boy (played by Khary Payton, Hynden Walch, Tara Strong and Greg Cipes, all solid voice actors).

Then he finds out that all the other evil-fighters are getting film deals. The timely comic premise of Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic’s story is that even in the age of Peak Superhero Movie, the Teen Titans remain shut out.

Alfred, Batman’s butler, is getting a spinoff. So is the Batmobile. There’s another Green Lantern movie, for gosh sake. (“But we don’t talk about that,” another character adds.)

So, what’s the problem? Robin chafes when Superman calls them “goofsters.” (Superman is voiced, in a brilliant bit of casting, by Nic Cage, who was desperate to play the Man of Steel back in the 1990s.) The Teen Titans are all silliness and comic relief, and that’s an issue in a franchise known for its brooding, mopey, dramatic tendencies. (Cue a parody of the sequence in which two good guys inexplicably fight each other in the rain.)

Meanwhile, director Jade Wilson (voiced by Kristen Bell) offers a glint of hope when she suggests the Titans just need a good universe-threatening supervillain. Enter Slade (Will Arnett), an archnemesis who keeps getting mistaken for Deadpool but is — fortunately for parents — “less inappropriate.”

Slade steals a powerful crystal — “This will make a perfect plot device,” he crows. But at this point, Robin doesn’t actually care about vanquishing evil. He’s only concerned with whether the fight will look “cinematic.”

As the rudimentary story unfolds, there are gags about tragic origin stories, digs at Marvel, and an animated Stan Lee cameo – he’s told it’s a DC movie, but he just doesn’t care, so great is his love of cameos.

There are also fart jokes, poop jokes and bum jokes, as well as an upbeat, inspirational song about life (chorus: “This is an upbeat, inspirational song about life”).

Along with this anarchistic, all-over-the-place Warner Bros.-style humour, the script occasionally veers into the pointlessly nasty. Robin spends most of the movie being kind of a jerk, and one scene involves the Titans beating up Shia LaBeouf, which feels like kicking a man when he’s down.

The Lego Batman Movie also pulled off a satire on comic-book clichés and a spoofy puncturing of the self-serious DC mythos, but that 2017 movie somehow managed to integrate its audience of kids and adults. Teen Titans ping-pongs between them, alternating between gross-out gags (hello, bodily functions!) and obscure old-timey comic-book references (hello, Challengers of the Unknown!).

And that’s the tricky thing about Teen Titans: it’s hard to say who the intended audience is. Meta-minded five-to-eight-year-olds? Ironical tweens? Grown-up comic-book nerds killing time between Justice League movies? There’s something here for everyone, but it doesn’t quite add up.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca