Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice

Rating: 5/10 (30 March 2016)

As a pretty hardcore fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I'm worried this review will fall on deaf ears, or, worse still, stoke the ire of the film's rabidly defensive fan base, but I can honestly say that in the weeks leading up to its release I was actually getting excited at the prospect of a whole new shared superhero universe to immerse myself in. So I put a smile on my face, shrugged off my preconceptions about director Zack Snyder, who to my mind only has one good film under his belt in 2009's Watchmen, and skipped on down to the local cinema to see Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. On a Tuesday. At 4 in the afternoon.
The film follows 2013's Man of Steel, which unsuccessfully attempted to introduce grim realism and despair to a story about an alien who looks exactly like a human and speaks perfect English, who flies around in a very colorful outfit fighting injustice amidst a flurry of cacophonous action sequences and CGI. After briefly glossing over Batman's origin story, we open with that film's climax, seen from the ground through the eyes of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), who gets very cross about all of this Superman nonsense when the battle decimates a Wayne Enterprises building full of people he supposedly cares about. Eighteen months later, Bruce still harbors a grudge against Supes, while fighting crime in Gotham as the Batman. Meanwhile, the world is in a heated debate about whether or not they need Superman and how he should be kept in check. Superman himself (Henry Cavill) is having something of an identity crisis as a result of it all. In another corner of the film, conniving weirdo whiz kid, Lex Luthor, Machiavellian genius that he is, persuades his way into a powerful position through various methods which include explosives, hard candy, and fingertip removal. From here he manipulates both of our costumed heroes into what is billed as the ultimate gladiator match, and events transpire quite predictably from there. You saw the trailers, I'm sure.
Despite my earnestness going into it, I came away very disappointed. In addition to being a good twenty minutes too long, it just doesn't have the right kind of energy for the kind of movie it wants to be. The pacing is wonky, jumping from one plot beat to the next, with nary a pause for character development of any depth or complexity, though the train does make a stop at surreal dream sequence station - twice, in fact. How is it that, in a two and a half hour movie, roughly ten minutes of which are taken up by the titular battle, the character arcs somehow feel rushed and disingenuous, the plot cluttered and unfulfilling? Perhaps it's the aforementioned dream sequences. Maybe it's in the relentlessly joyless tone as the film continues its humorless death march towards the inevitable climax. Maybe it's the inclusion of the Wonder Woman subplot, featuring shoehorned cameos from several members of the Justice League, because we didn't tack on that subtitle just for laughs. Somewhere in the middle of this mess is a solid two hour movie about two costumed crime fighters duking it out, but in its lofty ambitions, it tacked on one to many tassels and brought the whole thing crashing down.
I suppose we have Warner Bros. to direct most of the blame at, rather than Snyder or the rest of the creative team. After all, you don't blame the person who built the statue of a mangy dog in your neighbor's yard, no matter how off-putting or atrocious it is. You blame your neighbor for commissioning it in the first place. WB took one look at Marvel and decided they wanted to ride the shared universe gravy train without any of the care or effort that made Marvel such a smashing success, while simultaneously failing to realize that any perceived competition between the two brands has, at this point, essentially been decided. And we the film-goers suffer as a result. Oh, well.