'Legends of Tomorrow' Review: Nutty, Anarchic Fun

More than any current TV adaptation, Legends of Tomorrow captures the feeling of what it was like to read a DC Comics team-up “special issue” during the Silver Age of comics in the 1960s. It also helps if you’re about eight years old.

The team assembled for this latest Greg Berlanti-produced bagatelle, premiering on Thursday night after you’ve consumed new episodes of his Flash (on Tuesday) and Arrow (on Wednesday) is a nuttily eclectic one. The show is led by Rip Hunter, a supercilious British “time master” played by Doctor Who’s Arthur Darvill and certainly not my idea of the Rip Hunter I grew up with, which is this all-American:

He gathers around him Brandon Routh’s incredible shrinking Atom; the Firestorm hero who is produced by melding Franz Drameh with Victor Garber and stepping back to avoid the explosion; Caity Lotz’s White Canary, who’s as bad-ass as one can be when attired in white pleather; Hawkman (Falk Hentschel) and Hawkgirl (Ciara Renee), who must groan every time they have to lower that crazy-heavy-looking head gear onto their noggins; and buddy-villains Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller) and Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell), who try to out-do each other in their dueling menacing growls.

With the possible exception of the Atom, there’s not an A-lister in the bunch, but that’s part of what makes Legends fun, at least initially. Rip Hunter seems to have chosen this bunch by going to his local comic-book store and throwing a bunch of random 1960s issues in the air and seeing which landed first. (Why couldn’t he have chosen my man Congo Bill?)

The team’s common enemy is Vandal Savage (Casper Crump, whose real name deserves a super-hero character of its own, preferably someone who wields deadly super-crumpets). Savage is raising hell in 2016 and can zip back and forth in history to generate mayhem, which is one reason Rip the time traveler in on the case. He’s also a villain so powerful that more than one hero is needed; thus the “Legends,” who are ironically named since none is (yet) legendary.
The whole concept — fleshed out by producers Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg, and Marc Guggenheim — has the potential for amusement, especially in its mix of motivations. Whereas Captain Cold and Heat Wave are along to rob whatever’s not nailed down while the others aren’t looking, the two Hawks are after nothing less than trying to avoid being killed and reincarnated by Savage for the umpteenth time in their convoluted histories together.

There are elements that weaken the show. The dialogue is stilted (“Grant me the permission to change the timeline just this once!”), the acting, with the exception of the fluid Garber and the amusingly tough slouching of Lotz, tends to be stiff (although to be fair, you can’t really emote if you have the gigantic bronze headgear and the enormous wings Henschel and Renee must shoulder). But as heroic team-up shows go, the junky eclecticism of Legends of Tomorrow seems, based on the first two episodes, more engaging than the more solemn exploits of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD.

Then again, as a kid, I was always more of a DC guy than a Marvel guy.

Legends of Tomorrow airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on the CW.