Wonder Woman 1984 a superhero adventure that wears its heart on its sleeve — but misses the moment

Arriving at the end of a disastrous year for movie exhibition, Warner Bros’s endlessly delayed Wonder Woman sequel is starting to look like the dying gasp of the blockbuster as we know it — especially in the US, where the film has already sounded industry doomsday chimes by debuting on HBO Max.

On the strength of this movie, however, it’s a struggle to mourn the potential extinction of tentpole cinema — at least in its long-dominant, market-suffocating superhero form.

Like its 2017 predecessor, a multi-million-dollar corporate product that rode the conversation around representation to a sense of cultural significance, the new film, again directed by Patty Jenkins, is a big, cornball superhero adventure that — to its credit —…