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Narm / DC Extended Universe

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DC Extended Universe

Man of Steel

  • The cocoons Zod and his crew are put in look fine on the ground, but when they they start floating, you'll realize that with their phallic shape and flat base, they look like a bunch of flying dildos.
  • Clark's conversation with the priest of Smallville's local church. Not only is it filled with tooth-grindingly clichéd lines ("What does your gut tell you?" "Sometimes you need to take a leap of faith!"), the priest seems weirdly nonchalant about a stranger waltzing into his church and casually claiming to be an alien.
  • A random guy falling out of the back of the jet that Lois is on would be tragic if it wasn't for the fact that the Wilhelm scream is used, which sounds extremely jarring.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

  • In a story that deals with the fallout of Superman's controversial acts of destruction taken to kill General Zod in the previous film, we get a memorial to those that had died in the battle much like a 9/11 memorial.. overshadowed by the massive statue to Superman right in front of it. The fact that it gets defaced by a survivor is likely to get a "yeah that sounds about right" out of the viewer rather than any sort of intended shock value. The media then react to this by calling it a hate crime and a terrorist threat, getting the legless man hauled away to jail for writing "false god" on the statue because apparently people take that super seriously.
  • That drop of snot on Luthor's upper lip that is present in his final scene.
  • Batman's first appearance in costume looks less chilling and more like he's awkwardly hiding in the corner because there was nothing in the room for him to duck behind, considering he had plenty of time to just leave.
  • The "Believe me, I'll do it" line made a lot more sense from its original source (a teenage gang member), but when coming from the mouth of a hardened international criminal, and the counterpart of a super villain that has actually beaten Batman in the past, it makes him seem like an overly insecure idiot, and so it just comes off as ridiculous.
  • The fight during the Knightmare sequence could have been badass, but Batman looks so hilariously stiff and stilted thanks to the trench coat and cargo pants. More than one fan has admitted to pretending that he has a sandwich in his hand the whole time with how stiff his fighting looks.
  • Diana's email scene, which is one of the most widely-mocked moments of the movie. It was clearly meant to get audiences and comic fans excited by showing them the first glimpses of Aquaman, The Flash and Cyborg, but it's so awkwardly placed and so blatantly just there to tease future spin-offs that detractors have likened it to watching a trailer in the middle of a movie. For many, it also highlights the rather rushed nature of the DCEU as a whole, since the audience just gets half of the future Justice League dumped on them in a single scene with zero prior build-up. It's often compared to the equally infamous "Thor's visions" subplot in Avengers: Age of Ultron, another awkward bit that very obviously exists just to set up future films.
  • The "Martha" exchange. Batman's reaction is so over-the-top that it comes off almost as though he's surprised that there exists another person in the world with his mother's name, and he repeatedly asks "Why did you say that name?" at varying levels of intensity, not so different from Zod's "I will find him" chain from the last film.
  • The scene of Batman looking at Robin's costume, though intended as tragic, is undercut a fair bit by the fact that it suggests Robin's costume, much like the pre-Tim Drake outfits, was bare-legged. Especially funny when you look at the stiff movie-superhero leather that the costume (like the others in the movie) is made of; apparently Batman just really wanted Robin's gams on display.
  • Batman's threats upon meeting Superman could have been badass if it weren't for the context of Superman just backhanding his Batmobile away effortlessly. Instead it comes across as comically overconfident.
  • During the climactic fight against Doomsday, Wonder Woman gets knocked over with her legs in spread eagle, and the camera lingers just a bit too long. Her satisfied smile, while completely in character, makes it look really awkward out of context.
  • Jesse Eisenberg's performance as Lex Luthor is just so silly and over the top that it's near impossible to take him seriously as any kind of formidable villain. The fact that his plans are totally reliant on everyone else acting like total idiots doesn't help.

Suicide Squad

  • The Joker's redesign in general. While the idea of trying to update his look by making him more in line with a modern gangster or drug lord makes sense (since his original Golden Age characterization was based on mobsters of the 1930s), the resulting design is so over the top and "edgy" that it becomes impossible to take him seriously as an actual threat, with the "Damaged" tattoo on his forehead often pointed out as the prime offender.
  • Batman's capture of Deadshot starts with Batman dropping down behind Floyd who's Christmas shopping with his daughter and saying, "I don't want to do this in front of your daughter." While the line would have some gravitas if the two were already fighting and then Floyd's daughter ran onto the scene, Batman saying it after he jumps a man out with his daughter just comes across as plain ridiculous.
  • Enchantress's bizarre dance ritual in the finale, as well as the strange CGI effects for her "empowered" form that make her look like a bobblehead.note  She continues dancing... even as she delivers her evil speech to the villains.
  • There's also the absurd fact that the makers felt the need to make her CGI "empowered" form have much larger breasts than the actress actually has (including in the previous scenes where she was not digital), which wobble around like a video game as she talks and generally look ridiculous.
  • The seemingly low requirements to be recruited to the Squad garner some unintentional laughs. Boomerang is on the Squad explicitly because he's gone up against a meta-human and lived... which becomes kind of accidentally hilarious because the metahuman was The Flash, and Boomerang "lived" because he was so not a threat that Flash was in exactly no danger (as well as being The Cape.) Or Waller talking about Harley being so uncontrollable like it's a good thing. Note that in the film, it's explicitly mentioned that the Squad is being assembled to deal with threats on the level of Superman, which makes the decision to recruit so many characters without actual superpowers even more baffling.
    • Boomerang “surviving” against a metahuman becomes even funnier when you find out in Justice League (2017) that the Flash has never been in a real fight before and mainly just pushes bad guys over. Luckily the SnyderCut fixes this issue by showing how deadly a single push from a Speed Force user can be.
  • The Enchantress transforms ordinary people into her multi-eyed minions by kissing them. One by one. And she has dozens if not hundreds of them. Now try to envision that process. Maybe those eyes are actually coldsores?
  • Flagg's Infodump speeches are somewhat hard to take seriously due to the poorly-written dialogue, particularly the infamous "This is Katana. She's got my back!" speech. Many of the scenes where he says them are also very contrived, such as the scene where he grabs Deadshot and stops him from shooting Enchantress just to tell him that shooting the vulnerable Enchantress will end the battle (especially since he said the exact same thing a little over a minute beforehand).
  • In the Spanish dub, the amount of teenage slang from The New '10s inserted can be endearing in characters who are expected in-universe to use it, like Diablo, Harley and other criminals, but the fact that even Waller and her military staff speak like that as well makes it look not only ridiculous, but also like a cheap attempt by the translation team to pander to the young audiences (which, in all honesty, probably is).
  • In general, Jared Leto's Joker is really hard to take seriously. This can be chalked up to his aforementioned new look, his laugh which alternates between sounding like a creeping door and a person doing an intentionally bad/sarcastic cackle, that weird purring sound he makes, convoluted and pretentious dialogue, and some frankly bizarre delivery, among other issues.

Wonder Woman

  • At first, one could accept Ares in the form of a quintessential British gentleman. He is, after all, a notorious master of disguise. But then he takes on his true, terrible form... and you realize that no, it's not some form he chose to blend in. Under his fearsome suit of armor, the dreaded Ares, Physical God of war, conflict and bloodshed is a skinny, pale, balding British guy with a dweeby mustache, and it only gets sillier when he starts Chewing the Scenery as a god is expected to do.
    Diana: It's not about deserving. It's about what you believe. And I believe in love.
    Ares: THEN... I! WILL! DESTROOOY YOOOUUU!

Justice League

  • A good part of the Narm in the film is not helped by the fact that most of the actors phoned it in during the Joss Whedon-directed reshoots (due to much Hostility on the Set being involved).
  • The MacGuffin of the film is the Mother Box, which led to the inevitable nickname of "Martha Box", both because of the prominence in the plot, the way Steppenwolf keeps talking to the Box as "Mother" and gives grand speeches about "the Mother of Horrors" just to remind us what he's talking about, and the way it just develops New Powers as the Plot Demands (Teleportation, Terraforming, resurrecting dead heroes). Admittedly this is sort-of faithful to the comics source, except Jack Kirby never made it such a prominent over-riding part of his mythos. The true MacGuffin of the New Gods is the Anti-Life Equation. Plus, "Mother Box" is another of those old-school comic book terms from the Bronze Age which is impossible to take seriously nowadays when you hear it spoken out loud.
  • Some of Superman's scenes are ruined due to the obvious attempts to digitally hide Henry Cavill's mustache, leading to a lot of Unintentional Uncanny Valley. It's especially obvious in the opening scene with the kids using the cellphone camera, and then his bizarre close-up post-resurrection moment with Lois where he looks like a victim of Joker's happy-gas. Rather than have Henry Cavill shave for the movie (in fairness, he was legally bound not to, as it would have been a breach of contract with Paramount over his role in Mission: Impossible – Fallout) or perhaps give him a beard, his lower face was digitally altered to be clean shaven. Special Effect Failure aside, this gave him the rather uncanny resemblance to the Crimson Chin. Making it even more hilarious is that it turned out to be completely unnecessary, as production on Fallout was delayed for a few weeks due to co-star Tom Cruise breaking his ankle, and Cavill easily could have grown the mustache back in that time.
  • Superman and Lois on the farm, it's very hard to tell if it's meant to be funny, romantic, serious, all or none due to the obvious green screen and side splitting dialogue.
  • Batman's line to Superman "destroy that box so [he] can stop it from destroying all life on Earth" belongs more to a Saturday-Morning Cartoon than to a blockbuster that's meant to be taken seriously, especially with such a bored delivery.
  • The bald Arkham inmate who's been used as a decoy to allow Lex Luthor to escape. If he was meant to be scary, then it failed, especially with that ridiculous Evil Laugh of his, which has likely been done in voiceover given how poorly it synchronizes with his mouth.
  • Diana saying "Kal El, no" thanks to Gal Gadot's strange delivery, which almost slurs the words together and is so flat that it sounds like she's mildly scolding a dog.
  • When Superman arrives on the scene and curb-stomps Steppenwolf, he hears some cries for help and says "civilians" in a zombie-like manner. The desperate attempt to assure the audience that DCEU Superman actually cares about the safety of innocents can be quite the eye-roller, as Batman v Superman already included an entire heroic montage, a battle taken to an empty harbor and a self-sacrifice that confirmed as much.

Aquaman

  • The soundtrack's "Dun Dun Dun!" after King Nereus name-drops the "Ocean Master" title. Orm’s insistence that the Brine King call him Ocean Master comes across as unbelievably silly, especially thanks to that added echo.
  • The sheer amount of times an innocuous conversation is interrupted by a surprise attack from one of the villains, which eventually just feels like a Running Gag rather than anything you can take seriously.
  • Like Arthur and Orm, the Brine King carries a trident to show that he's in charge, but it ends up looking so spindly the way he holds it in his massive crab pincers that the overall effect is cumulatively less badass than if he was just fighting bare-handed...er, bare-pincered.
  • Ocean Master yelling: "RIIIIIIIISE ANTLAAAAANTIS!" His voice reverberating is supposedly due to being underwater but it sounds like he's an WWE Announcer preparing for the Main Event.

Birds Of Prey

  • Harley Quinn's assault on GCPD is awesome at times, with her using the beanbag shotgun, which is very colourful and badass, but the fact they continue to attack her one at a time, makes it come off as comical.

Wonder Woman 1984

  • Any drama in Simon Stagg's chewing out of Max Lord is ruined when Stagg walks out saying "Loser" like he's a juvenile bully on the playground.
  • When Diana confronts Max Lord in Egypt, she demands: “I need you to give me the stone”, in a flat, mildly raised voice that sounds more like a parent telling a child to take something out of their mouth.
  • During the Egypt car chase, Diana spots children playing on the road, despite the desert being completely flat, which means they would've probable seen the armored motorcade arrive minutes ago. To save them, she has Steve launch a rocket from his jeep, which she then lassos on to reach the children and grab them, only for her to fall, land on the children, which would probably break their spines, right where they were playing. Despite all of this, the cars still avoid Diana and the kids, meaning the kids wouldn't have been hit anyways, but now have gotten falling trauma. The really dodgy green screen and obviously fake dummies used for the kids don't help at all.
  • In the climax, the conversation between Lord and Diana consists of him yelling as loud as possible while she speaks at the same calm volume the whole way through. With all the noisy chaos going on in the room, you gotta wonder how the hell Max can hear her. You could Hand Wave this as being due to Diana's magical speaking through to him, but the sheer difference in volume between the characters can be quite distracting and silly.
  • Barbara's costumes after her change are quite well done in evoking the look of Cheetah while adhering to the time period's fashion sense. Unfortunately, her final look has been called out by many as not only extremely silly, but also very far from convincing. Doesn't help that it brought Cats to mind for many.
  • Diana's final confrontation with Lord doesn't involve any sort of physical fighting. Instead, Diana cannot approach Lord because of the wind. Sure, it's magically created wind, but it's difficult to take a scene seriously when a superhuman demigoddess who can fly is being pushed back what looks to be a relatively harmless gust of air.
  • After the highly dramatic moment where Max Lord thinks My God, What Have I Done? and renounces his wish he then immediately runs away in an anticlimactic flat shot facing his behind that's evocative of the intentionally funny scene where Ralph Fiennes flees the police in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Zack Snyder's Justice League

  • In the Knightmare scene, Batman suddenly promising the Joker "I will fucking kill you" prompted outright bafflement from many, as it's the only time Batman uses such harsh language in the entire movie. Some called the sudden intensity justified given what Bruce had seen and suffered and this being After the End, while others thought it went too far into edgy try-hard territory. The foul language can also bring back bad memories of Frank Miller's infamous "Goddamn Batman", which certainly doesn't help.
  • The "ancient lamentation music" with a One-Woman Wail plays almost every single time Wonder Woman or any of the Amazons do anything at all. It's so overused and melodramatic that it's hard to take seriously.

Black Adam

  • The poster's tagline "The world needed a hero — it got Black Adam" received a fair bit of snark, as it sounds less like Black Adam is a Villain Protagonist and more like he's of lesser quality. It also completely disregards how Superman has been active for 9 whole years by this point.
  • The sheer amount of times that Amon rides his skateboard for just a few seconds, only to pick it up again, comes off as comical. At one point he uses it to try and sneak silently past armed guards when walking would be quieter and quicker.
  • The Spaghetti Western-style Showdown at High Noon in the market square straddles the line between this and Narm Charm. On one hand, it looks funny and cool, as it shows Adam's reflexes. The problem is that the lead mercenary had already unloaded an entire clip from his assault rifle. Even if he had been quicker on the draw, it's safe to say his pistol wouldn't have done any damage.
  • Hawkman trying to argue for the code of heroes not-killing comes off as ridiculous, considering nearly all the previous heroes in the DCEU have killed before.
    • Black Adam's response also counts; he pauses as if trying to sound cool, and yet speaks with zero emotion.
    Hawkman: Heroes don't kill people.
    Black Adam: ... Well, I do.
  • Every single time Cyclone uses her wind powers, there's a slow-motion close-up of her face in the center of the whirlwind as if to remind audiences that it's her doing it, to the point it's easy to imagine a narrator dramatically saying her name like with Ricky Spanish.

Alternative Title(s): Batman V Superman Dawn Of Justice, Wonder Woman 1984

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