DC League of Super-Pets
Year: 2022
Rating: PG
Length: 105 minutes / 1.75 hours
I’ve never been a huge pet person because of allergies. As such, I initially passed on DC League of Super-Pets (2022) because it didn’t seem interesting to me (I also wasn’t wild about Kevin Hart or Dwayne Johnson as voice actors). Of course, with kids around, I eventually had the opportunity to watch this movie with them. Overall, it’s a pretty basic superhero movie that just happens to feature animals instead of humans. It has the usual jokes that adults would get and the silly little gags that appeal to children. Mostly, it’s just…there.
Because it’s telegraphed that each of the pets eventually ends up with one of the members of the Justice League, I was hoping there was slightly more synergy between the animals/powers and the heroes they’d be matched with. Krypto (Dwayne Johnson) makes sense, but he already had a connection to Superman (John Krasinski). At the very least, there was some variety with the pets in that they weren’t just dogs and cats (in fact, there weren’t any cats at all). I can also appreciate all the “experiments” with the guinea pigs having a large variety of powers for the villain to use.
Perhaps the most redeeming part of this movie is the exposure of kids to shelter animals. While they can always get a pet from a pet store, using the local animal shelter to give a home to an animal that may have been abused or is older than usual is a great way to teach kids that nobody is perfect and everyone deserves a loving home. The flip side, of course, being that most kids might want a pet that requires a lot of work to take care of but don’t understand the household burden.
An average superhero film that features animals instead of humans, I give DC League of Super-Pets 3.0 stars out of 5.
