Apart from the cool and interesting transformations that Gohan and Piccolo received, the movie has very few redeeming qualities. Unfortunately even the transformations aren't as satisfying as they should have been because they are rushed out and feel unearned (sort of like the movie itself). This is the struggle that all anime movies have to overcome given the short time slot they are afforded, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero just does a terrible job of mitigating that pitfall.
The main antagonist is Cell-Max, a bastardized version of one of Dragon Ball's finest villains in Cell. Cell-Max is most aptly compared to another terribly conceptualized villain by the name of Bio-Broly, of whom gets most of his value as a villain in the form of comedic value, because of how comically bad he is. Speaking of Broly, I don't know why they even teased him in the movie. They didn't show him much at all and what they showed felt like they should have showed us more, in retrospect at least it serves as hope of something interesting happening in the future after what id consider Dragon Ball Supers lowest point. Part of what makes it so bad is that the movie is canon and not only that but written by Toriyama himself.. yikes. Hard to believe Toriyama actually played a hand in this movie.
Gohan and Piccolo were in need of a power boost so I am glad that their transformations are canon, however its as if Toriyama liked the transformations and said "yep, lets make the whole thing canon". They should have made the transformations canon and took the time to flesh them out properly instead of being conceptualized to fit within a movie.
Spoiler, click to view
Cell-Max cracking at the seams and dying the way he did didn't make any sense to me, Cell had to be destroyed on a cellular level in DBZ ITS IN HIS NAME. I understand Cell-Max is just a derivative of Cell but still he should of needed to be destroyed on a cellular level, his name is CELL after all.There is probably several other things I could criticize about the movie, its been months since I watched it and my mind is subconsciously attempting to forget as much of it as it can. I am genuinely curious how this movie is one of the highest rated Dragon Ball movies on this app, seriously?
I enjoy the majority of DBS post ToP despite the moral backtracking in regards to power-scaling with dragon balls etc. Hopefully one day they actually get around to animating the manga again! Dragon Ball Super catches way to much hate but I can't defend this movie and I was looking forward to watching it too.
Respect to Toriyama and his past creations but bad writing is bad writing..
