Here's where things begin to go awry. He kills scene after scene, sequence after sequence, by insisting on constant camera movement. Actors go leaping and flying around the sets, but so does the camera. We're never sure if the mayhem is caused by the characters or the director. And there are very few throwaway lines, lines that might lighten the tone, if only for a moment.
Singer just hammers everything to death.
McKellan and Stewart are old pros, of course, with the most mellifluous and resonant voices in film today, and we hope that their few meetings will strike sparks. But their dialogue is flatly written and the confrontations are poorly staged, so we lose even the power they might have given the film. The final battle sequence is set in and on the head and torch of the Statue of Liberty, and we in the audience should feel the giddy, knee-buckling vertigo that comes with dangerous height and the likelihood of death by falling. But the fear is strangely absent here, and the reason is that Singer keeps moving his camera up, down, and around the various fights, not letting the location itself do the work for him. The film's ending is obviously the setup for a sequel, so if the film does well at the box office we will no doubt see another one.