An aimless, uninteresting, and frankly deeply disappointing follow-up to 2017’s critically beloved and widely-adored Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman 1984 is a top-down failure of a sequel. Losing nearly all the magic of what made the Diana Prince character work so well in her first solo venture and throughout her tenure in the DCEU, this unintelligible next chapter is a total overstuffed mess that somehow manages to be both too heavy and too thin on plot, one that shambles around for a two-and-a-half-hour runtime without ever truly convincing us that it has much of a story to tell in the first place. Folks, it’s a damn mess.

Roughly 70 years after the events of the first film, wherein Diana faced down her God father to save mankind from the horrors of war and lost her lover Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) in the process, the anonymous and ageless Wonder Woman lives amongst mere mortals in the excess that is the 1980s. When an ancient magical doohickie that has the ability to grant wishes crosses Diana’s path, she discovers a way to rekindle her lost flame but must also face new adversaries in Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) and new-found frenemy Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) aka “Cheetah”.

Gal Gadot returns for her fourth turn as the Amazonian warrior princess and though she remains a warm and assured presence in the film, writer-director Patty Jenkins just doesn’t seem to know what to do with her this time. Too-often, the sequel sidelines its hero in order to focus on other characters, mainly Lord and Barbara; characters who often suffer their own examples of extremely convoluted motivation. Diana remains a stoic and ostensibly inspiring figure but, reduced of her powers and often a step behind the action, the Wonder Woman sequel somehow finds a way to squander its titular character.

It’s well established fact that with superhero sequels, the most common cardinal sin is to overcomplicate your rogues gallery; to figure too many villains into the equation and lose focus in so doing. All the greats have made this mistake at some point or another: Batman, Spider-Man, Iron-Man, the X-Men. Wonder Woman 1984 is the latest to join the ranks of offenders, giving us two villains who struggle to define both their own individual motivation within the film and their opposition to Diana/Wonder Woman.

Wiig does a fine job early in the film as Barbara, when she’s essentially a quirky nerd who’s walked all over at work (though her proximity to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman is too obvious to ignore) but as she makes a Faustian bargain to trade her greatest assets (her kindness and intelligence) for raw power and appeal, the character becomes a nothing entity, there purely to provide a physical adversary for Diana. Unfortunately, Jenkins cannot even justify their inevitable clashes; the CGI is overabundant, unflattering, and generally gummy, with a total vacuum of dazzling set pieces and nothing that ever comes close to Diana’s striking charge across No Man’s Land in the last film. By the end of the feature, no matter Wiig’s frazzled charm and feline angst, Cheetah is a lame, shallow baddie that exists only to bash against Diana when the plot calls for an action scene.

Pascal too offers a small sample of a compelling foil with Max Lord, a bed-wetting grifter-cum-power-hungry-genie, but he soon slides into complete and utter narrative muck. It shouldn’t be this difficult to decipher what the main villain is trying to achieve in the movie and yet Jenkins thinks it’s enough to draw parallels between his character and Trump and call it a day. Seriously, I still struggle to define exactly what Lord’s plan was and how his whole wish scheme factors into that plan.

Themes of truth prevailing over greed and the dangers of seeking excess are so obvious and juvenile that it makes you wonder how Jenkins still falls face-first into the pratfall of her own critique. For a movie that’s so eager to condemn “more”, it certainly goes for broke cashing out all it can with very little narrative currency. Excess for its own sake is an ugly thing, the film insists, and yet Wonder Woman 1984 rarely even attempts to define its storytelling purpose, purpose beyond capitalizing on endless franchising and the accompanying stacks of dollars.

The details are so slapdash and arbitrary that, even at an utterly inexcusable 151 minutes, it appears that certain story beats are just outright missing. At one point, Diana changes costumes offscreen, sometime after she is whipping her way across lighting and then just full-on flying (?). Somewhere within this time, she is able to completely change costumes into a shiny gold outfit that I’m certain will boost action figure sales – and seems designed to do only that. And yet, this seems the only reason for the existence and inclusion of this moment. A prime and egregious example of a movie that give lip service to calling out waste and excess and yet is content to waste audiences time on a careless and uneventful blockbuster of excess.

CONCLUSION: A bitter comedown from the aspirational heights of Patty Jenkins’ original, ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ ranks among the least inspired (and most head-scratching and dull) of super-sequels, asking for a lot of time, money, and energy, and giving us almost nothing in return on that investment.