Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice

As underwhelming and lackluster as its predecessor, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice follows the title characters (Henry Cavill’s Superman and Ben Affleck’s Batman) as they duke it out over differing opinions on how best to serve the public – with the pair eventually forced to cooperate after Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) unleashes a weapon that could destroy all of humanity. It’s clear immediately that one of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice‘s biggest deficiencies is its distractingly low-rent visual appearance, as director Zack Snyder and cinematographer Larry Fong have infused the proceedings with a grainy, cheap-looking sensibility that’s heightened and perpetuated by an ongoing emphasis on shoddy special effects (ie some of this stuff looks like it’s straight out of the movie’s video game adaptation). Beyond that, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice suffers from a whole raft of problems that increasingly test one’s patience – with the erratic and almost stunningly disjointed narrative compounding the movie’s various issues and preventing the viewer from embracing the material or characters. In terms of the latter, Cavill and Affleck, competent as they may be, are generally able to strike only a single note of grim determination that essentially (and effectively) drains their iconic characters of their energy – while Eisenberg’s disastrously quirky performance sticks out like a sore thumb from start to finish (ie the actor seems to be channeling Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight, which quickly proves to be the absolute wrong choice for Luthor). And although the anticipated bout between Batman and Superman is actually not terrible (it is, at the very least, coherent), Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice closes with an interminable climactic stretch detailing an uninvolving battle with a laughably generic computer-generated creation – which, when coupled with more false endings than the last Lord of the Rings movie, confirms the film’s place as just another incompetent endeavor from an almost shockingly untalented filmmaker.

** out of ****