Totally disappointing!

Rating: 1/10 (30 March 2016)

Let me just get this out of the way; this is a really awful film that doesn't warrant your time at all. I'm not a big fan of Zack Snyder but I am a big Batman fan, and I do like superhero films and comics. This film is about as passionless and empty as a blockbuster can get. The first hour and a half is just jumping from one scene to the next with way too many things going on yet somehow a complete lack of momentum or interest, taking time setting up a fight between Batman & Superman that is eventually anticlimactic and setting up Lex as the villain, all of this happening with quite a dark overtone. Then all of a sudden there's a new villain, and Wonder Woman, and then a whole new film seems to kick in that's far more goofy yet somehow much worse than the muddled first two acts. The dialogue is embarrassingly bad, the story is all over the place and has no thrust, emotion or substance. All they do is keep talking about morals when both Batman and Superman act out of character numerous times and cause insane amounts of wanton destruction and death. Batman and Superman hate each other for barely a good reason, and the way their dynamic changes throughout is extremely unbelievable and lacking in deep motivation. You start to wonder how Snyder, with some of the most iconic characters in comic book history, couldn't muster one moment of actual interest, suspense or artistic flair. I found it more joyless and pointless than the recent Fantastic Four (which had good ideas but was ruined by the studio in my opinion). There are way too many characters, for no real good reason, some decent special effects but not really any memorable action, completely inappropriate casting (Jesse Eisenberg comes across more akin to the Riddler than Lex Luthor), relentless superficial moralising and religious claptrap and an ending so anticlimactic that I've forgotten most of it already. The script is the first thing that should have been altered, it's just awful, and then Zack Snyder should have been booted off and somebody with at least some capability in extracting something credible from an overcooked, poorly written plot-hole filled script should have been pulled in to save the mess. He takes the bad writing and runs it even further into the ground with a completely uninspired directorial effort. What a waste of source material and budget! Avoid.