By Emi Gruender and Mia Hanuska
Welcome back to Groovy Movies, where The Shield writers Emi Gruender and Mia Hanuska scour Amazon Prime’s movie selection to find the most hilariously terrible movies! This episode, we grabbed various sweet gummy snacks and after some deliberation, landed on Avengers of Justice: Farce Wars.
Episode 11: Avengers of Justice: Farce Wars
★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ — 3/10
*Beware! Spoilers below!*
Just from the opening lines, we knew we were in for…something. We went into the movie expecting an Avengers spoof, yet the very first scenes were of the opening style for the Star Wars franchise, with the text explaining the main protagonists’ names of Dark Jokester and Lisp Luthor. Thumb in mouth, Dark Jokester awakes in a child’s bedroom somewhere in space to his TV flashing with a TEMU-esque Sith decked out in a skeleton face mask and red face paint. Jokester receives instructions from the knockoff Sith, and suddenly we’re whisked away with a transition of a bat logo with the letters “SB” engraved in them.
The scene is now a 7-11-core liquor store in the middle of suburbia where our fatherly protagonist shops for yet another pack of beers. As he’s walking toward the checkout though, he sees through the establishment’s glass doors a couple of naughty kids playing with a soccer ball near his pristine car. Rushing to yell at the children, he’s completely oblivious—ignorant?—to the entire outside world, including the giant warehouse fire occurring just a few blocks away and the fact that the convenience store he was shopping in was getting robbed at gunpoint. Because obviously, his 1969 Ford Torino GT is so much more important than the innocent lives of those in the fire and store.
Now home, the man opens a letter we can only assume was far too awaited, just for it to be a rejection letter from Lisp Corp where he applied for a job in security. We greatly enjoyed the letter’s Canva design with big red stamps saying “EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE” and “GETTING FAT,” implying the company received enough applications in which these were needed to be made into real stamps. We meet his absolutely stunning wife, Jean Wonder, and his two children, Lucas and Reya. They are one of the few superhero families, but apparently, the man—whom we learn is Superbat, or Bruce Kent—and Jean Wonder have lost their powers due to age. Their children are just beginning to develop their superpowers; with Reya having the ability to create force fields and Lucas being…super smart. Neither of these actors looked 16-17, by the way. Raya, especially, looked like a grown woman parading as a child with her slick-back pigtails, overzealous eyeshadow, and choker.
Lucas creates a robot, C.R.E.P.O., and brings him into Kent’s man cave where CREPO promptly breaks Kent’s mother’s urn, causing the ashes to go everywhere. Immediately after being completely covered in his own mother’s ashes, Jean enters the doorway and starts scolding Kent for supposedly lacking ambition and not caring about anything. Can this woman learn to read a freaking room?? Maybe now isn’t the best time to bother your husband??? Crazy idea!
The rest of a blur. What we do remember is the much too long side arc of Bruce visiting a yoga master covered in green paint (Master Yoga) and learning how to harness “the Farce,” instead of relying on his now-fading superpowers. We also remember the nearly incomprehensible lisp of the secondary antagonist, Lisp Luthor, and how we got an origin story of why he’s bald (a death ray burned it off). Lucas got mad at his dad and joined Dark Jokester to become “Dark Lucas,” complete with the guyliner and spray-painted green hair. Eventually, Lisp and the Jokester use his DNA to create an army of clown-minions that serve as their little goonies to guard Luther Corp. And finally, we remember the introduction of other knock-off hero spoofs, like “El Capitan,” “Thorbacca,” and Emi’s personal favorite: Beaverine.
Aside from the quite obviously rough storyline and characters leaving much to desire, the movie really just doesn’t have much appeal. A lot of the voices sound like they got voiced over but in various different rooms, so the audio is all over the place and looks like a bad lipsync. We regularly were so confused throughout the film just on what was happening because half of this felt like a fever dream and half felt like we were going to fall asleep. Also, the soundtrack?? Whoever composed the songs for this movie must’ve been so proud of their work because we couldn’t hear a word the actors were saying over the crazy loud—and dramatic—music playing in the background. It felt like we were trying to decipher whispers at an opera. The best way to describe the editing was that it genuinely felt like we were watching one of those sketchy RocketMoney ads where they ask you to scan their QR code to download their virusapp.
Now, let’s move to a tangent from Mia: Dark Jokester needs to keep his tongue in his mouth. Please. I beg of him. Every single time he was on screen I was physically recoiling from how much tongue action was going on in his mouth. The man couldn’t speak normally without his tongue trying to escape like Salamano’s dog from The Stranger or those monkeys from The Right Stuff. The frightening-ness of his tongue alone drops at least 4 stars from my rating of this film. I would not watch Dark Jokester’s scenes again if you PAID me. It wasn’t even important to his character! To Jarret Tarnol (the director of Avengers of Justice: Farce Wars): this was the one of the worst creative decisions I’ve ever seen made and I watched all 1.5 hours of Birdemic: Shock and Terror. I deserve reparations. Never again. Please.
Back to our regularly scheduled content…the end felt incredibly anticlimactic, and we were left disappointed and frustrated on the hour and a half we spent watching the film. When rating the film, we surprised ourselves in realizing we would rather rewatch Crackcoon—or even Sharks of the Corn—than view this movie again. Jarret Tarnol really displayed his hidden talent in directing this movie. We urge him to next time, keep it hidden.
Notable Quotes:
- “It’s okay baby, Daddy is right here”
- “Superbat. The man, the myth, the wife.”
- “I’ve never met an Indian woman named Susan”
- “Even your belt doesn’t want to be around you”
- A: “He’s perfect!” B: “Perfectly stupid.”
- “You look nothing like your MySpace profile picture”
- “X chromosome vs Y chromosome”
- A: “Are we in a recession?” B: “I couldn’t tell”
- “I had to read it on my own Wikipedia page!”
- “Ready to begin your naughty training?”
- “Master Yoga said no teeth”
- “I learned that from this a**l retentive Yogi grain guy”
- “I’ve fulfilled my last two eights of the bargain, Lisp.”
- “Handmade in China, perhaps.”
- A: “I do not trust Lando.” B: “Why? Because he has dreads?” A: “I don’t trust people with eye patches”
