Brian Viner WHA BAM! thank y MA’AM!

The long-awaited feminist super-heroine Wonder Woman gets the beastly Hun on the run

Wonder Woman (12A) Verdict: Great fun Baywatch (15) Verdict: Don’t watch

SPIDER-MAN’S webbing has sagged and the Batmobile has failed its MoT in the time it has taken the superhero genre to produce a female lead. But at least the long wait has been worthwhile.

Wonder Woman, just the second feature by Patty Jenkins after her acclaimed 2003 film Monster, is an exhilarating joyride of a movie. Most of the first act takes place on the lush island of Themyscira, a kind of alphafemale resort where there’s no call for yoga by the pool, but a heavy demand for teaching in kickboxing, swordplay and hanging sideways off galloping horses.

This is the home of the formidable Amazons, ruled by Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) and her warrior sister, Antiope, played by Robin Wright, who also happens to be back on our TV screens this week as the icy First Lady Claire Underwood in Netflix’s House Of Cards and thus has the female empowerment market cornered.

Antiope wants to train Hippolyta’s daughter Diana in the art of fighting. ‘A scorpion must sting, a wolf must hunt,’ she says. Very Claire Underwood. Whatever, by the time Diana grows up to be Gal Gadot, the striking Israeli actress already glimpsed as Wonder Woman in last year’s Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, she is a match for anyone.

We are back in the time of the mythological gods, indeed Zeus himself is the nearest thing Diana has to a father. But superhero films never were constrained by historical discipline, and suddenly a World War I biplane comes spiralling out of the sky. It is piloted by Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), a dishy American spy in a German uniform.

Half the German navy is on his tail, evidently because Steve has pinched, from a mad scientist known as Dr Poison (Elena Anaya), a manual containing topsecret formulae for deadly gases. Naturally, Diana saves Steve’s life and then helps see off the beachstorming Boche, giving her time to appraise the first man she has ever met.

‘Would you say you were a typical example of your sex?’ she asks, guilelessly, as he rises, gorgeously, from one of the island’s natural steam pools.

This, I’m sorry to say, prompted a knowing giggle from the woman next to me in the cinema. But then knowing giggles are what Wonder Woman and its male screenwriter, Allan Heinberg, are gunning for. The film’s occasional feminist flourishes, its playful references to gender politics, all come with a welcome light wit.

It’s also extremely refreshing to find a superhero who has only external devils to fight, not inner demons. In a way Wonder Woman is the anti-Wolverine, the anti-Batman. Her only preoccupation is to put a stop to all armed conflict, which she thinks she can do by eliminating the God of War, her bloodthirsty half-brother Ares.

He’s the cause of this terrible four-year slaughter, she thinks, and for those of us who can never quite remember how the assassination of Franz Ferdinand kicked off World War I, maybe that’s as good an explanation as any.

But in what human guise will Ares appear? Is he the iron-fisted German General Ludendorff (Danny Huston)? I won’t let on, though you don’t need a doctorate in narrative twists to work it out.

By now, our heroic pair are in London, where Diana, to her consternation, has to swap her killer outfit for something a little more