Well, I can't say I wasn't warned

Rating: 4/10 (7 October 2016)

Yeah, I read the articles talking about now awful this movie was. How it was a dour mess. But you know, a lot of people had been critical of Man of Steel, which I really liked, so I thought, maybe it's just similar to that and people think it's a bit dark and pretentious, but it'll probably still be fun.
But no, this really is awful.
I didn't think so immediately; at first I just thought it was trying to hard. There's a moment early on involving a pearl necklace that tries desperately to create a cool cinematic moment, but it feels forced, and much of the opener feels pretentious. But that's five minutes of the movie, and I could live with it.
The main problems turn out to be that the movie is slow and that the story is ridiculous.
There's some good ideas in the movie. I like the way it considers Batman and Superman not as heroes but as vigilantes, and there's a delicious irony in the two of them each mistrusting the others approach to crime fighting.
On the other hand, Superman's concerns are pretty reasonable, while Batman goes off the rails. And one of the great frustrations of the story is that it only works if Batman is far stupider and less inquiring than he has ever been before. In this movie, essentially he's the sort of guy who sees someone with a "kick me" sign on their back and kicks them without asking, who put on that sign? Everything he does in the film relies on his being a complete idiot, although in their big confrontation Superman also proves himself to be a weak thinker (that whole scene, in spite of some good action, is utterly, frustratingly senseless).
Not that there aren't other issues. Jesse Eisenberg seems to have been told he was playing Joker before the crackup and thus offers a really peculiar Lex Luthor. The movie is often utterly absurd, for example in suggesting that a nuclear missile could be aimed directly at a target in space that was speeding around erratically.
While much of the movie is a huge waste of time, there are some good performances, particularly Amy Adams and Gal Gadot, and a battle at the end between three superheroes and one monster that is quite fun, although not as good as the action in Man of Steel.
Director Zack Snyder approached Man of Steel as though it were a classic, Camelot-style myth, which worked well, but he approached Batman vs. Superman as though it were a Shakespearean tragedy, which is why it often sits in that uncomfortable place where something is so grim that it flips over into unintentionally funny.
This is a big-budget superhero movie, so I know that those who like these things, as I do, cannot be convinced to skip this one. But the most you should really watch is perhaps the last half hour. Don't say you weren't warned.