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The best thing that can be said of the third and final chapter of Crisis on Infinite Earths is that it features the final performance of Kevin Conroy. The long-time Batman voice actor had passed away, but delivered one last line as the caped crusader for this movie. It’s a good one and feels very fitting for such a revered actor within DC Comics animated productions. But it’s a brief cameo in a bloated and confusing movie, where the brief billboards along the road become more appealing than anything else.
Part Three delivers on a lot of the iconography of the original comic book as well as all the complexities without the intrigue. With the Anti-Monitor now present, the superheroes of various Earths now have a giant baddie to best. John Constantine takes on a greater role in connecting the universe together and to remind the audience of how this current animated movie universe connects to the last one. The intricacies bog down a finale that could’ve found an epic way to bring the Tomorrowverse to a close and pay tribute to the classic comic. What we’re left with instead is a dragged out conclusion with elonaged fights and false endings that topple over themselves, enough to make one long for the extended trilogy-closer of the last Hobbit movie.
The whole film reeks of a last-ditch effort to make this event feel bigger than it really is. It has a whiff of Across The Spider-Verse, as though it’s trying to tap into every drop of nostalgia and break every franchise barrier to engage its fans. But while the Spider-Verse movies had fun with its many iterations, Crisis on Infinite Earths feels like a slog of retro rehashing, more interested in shoving familiar elements onto the screen than playing with any of them. Remember when I mentioned Kevin Conroy returning as the original Batman? There’s more than that. There’s a universe preserving the look and feel of the original Justice League cartoon from the 2000s. Don’t, however, expect anything interesting to happen with this iteration, as the most we get is one more kiss between Jon Stewart and Hawkgirl. Even less is performed with the Super Friends universe before it’s obliterated, but that lacking of action does seem a tad on-point for that Earth.
The biggest problems bubble up to the surface for Part Three. We’ve spent so little time with the Tomorrowverse and few of its films have been good. It has all the lacking luster of 2023’s The Flash coming to a close. Remember how that film dabbled in retreading the past by propping up a CGI Christopher Reeve to remind you of a classic Superman? This animated denouement has a similar sensation as it drags out the older DC cartoons fans have been more fond of. There’s a legacy that people associate with Justice League, Batman: The Animated Series, and even Super Friends for the older crowd. Those cartoons have been around for far longer than the Tomorrowverse. Within the context of Crisis on Infinite Earths, these realms exist for only a few seconds before being obliterated by the Earth-destroying wave taking out all of existence. It’s hard not to look at this staging as a metaphor for how tough it is for Warner Bros to land similar successes with DC Comics properties, if only to break from the monotony of the continuous Anti-Monitor battle that is as tedius as it is abundant with superheroes. There’s a whole convoluted plot of how Constantine plays into all this, but it’s about as needlessly elaborate as the road to leading up to a bunch of superpowered beings firing lasers at a giant universe-destroying monster.
Crisis on Infinite Earths bids farewell to a universe we hardly knew or cared about. It is telling how little of this trilogy could stand on its own. It needed to bring in John Constantine from previous DC movies to have any sense of worthwhile continuity. It needed to dust off some DC classics to get the audience mildly interested, whether they needed a wee drop of Justice League romance or a final performance by Kevin Conroy. Instead of returning to these many iterations with affection, they appear as remnants at the bottom of the barrel for ideas on how to make these DC Comics animated movies stick. There’s a lesson to be learned from all this. Currently, there are two DC Comics cartoons that are doing very well; My Adventures With Superman and Batman: Caped Crusader. These cartoons have been great so far because they’ve taken the time to establish their characters and find what makes them work in a unique way. There’s no rush to slam together these two titans of DC Comics yet again. The failed DCEU showcased that you can’t rush those crossovers and the Tomorrowverse has proven this theory in animated form. There’s no point in zooming straight to something Crisis on Infinite Earths when there’s hardly anything worth caring about on the already established Earths.
