I was so ready to get into Superman/Batman: Public Enemies and love it. I love Batman, I admire Superman, and I really loved Jeph Loeb's comic book Batman: The Long Halloween. From the word I've heard on Loeb, maybe I haven't read enough of his stuff (or, rather, the less read, apparently, the better). This special 67 minute movie (shorter than usual) was adapted from one of his graphic novels, about how in a kind of bizarre turn of events (if not Bizarro-world) Lex Luthor is made President and declares after a faked-taped scene where Superman appears to be squashing a guy with a car, he puts a bounty on his head for a billion dollars. Now he is on the lam, and only his best friend Batman (er, not Jimmy Olson) comes to his aid when being attacked by a huge rogues gallery of Batman/Superman/DC villains, and even some superheroes who work for Luthor now that he's president. But there's also a meteor Armageddon style (if going through a wormhole for some reason) on the way. Ah, priorities.
The animation, as the biggest asset, is very good here, and the DC animation department deserves the highest praise for this one. For direct-to-video releases, their work just keeps getting better and better (if not quite up to par with last year's near-masterpiece New JLA New Frontier) and it's hard not to want to look at how they reveal a new villain or that giant robot-rocket that the Japanese kid/man develops shaped out of Batman/Superman fandom. But as for the story and writing, it's not so strong. It's predictable writing for much of the time, and the whole cast of villains and heroes is made for the die-hard comic book fans to be interested in - that is until they're pulled out of their one or two seconds of screen-time for someone else (and actors like John C. McGinley, good actors, don't have much time to show their own work). It also takes too long to get to the main problem of the meteor, and instead we get some of those silly scenes where Luthor acts all big and mean and nasty but is really just an a-Hole that could be squashed in a moment.
This isn't to say a great movie couldn't be made out of this premise of Superman and/or Batman on the lam. Maybe there's already similar episodes done in the past on Justice League Unlimted or another Justice League cartoon. But there's just something about it, the predictability and the weak bits of dialog, that don't settle easy. And it's also the fact that so much of what the WB/DC animated group has put out has been quality work (just recently as the Green Lantern movie two months ago) that it comes up short. Length, too, is also a factor; I'm ignorant on the Loeb comic, and maybe that is better (or worse), but it's hard not to want a little more story as opposed to mostly generic fighting scenes. For all of its good qualities, and the strength of the classic-cast voice work (Clancy Brown, Kevin Conroy, Tim Daly), it's just... OK. The original 90s Batman/Superman animated movie with the Joker and Luthor as villains is superior if you must see a match-up.
