**WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
First of all, a disclaimer: I am not a comic-book fan. It’s not that I don’t like them, I just never owned any, and, ironically, the only comic I have ever read just happens to be the one in which Superman fights Doomsday. It belonged to a guy I knew, and when I saw it among his collection (wall mounted within a plastic sleeve) I insisted on reading it as I found the idea of Superman being killed in battle quite fascinating. He agreed, pulled out a pair of tweezers so I could turn the pages, and I read my first, and only, comic.
Little did I know I was spoiling a movie for myself that would be released nearly a quarter of a century later.
The reason I give the above disclaimer is so you understand that when I rate these super-hero movies, I am rating purely as a cinema-goer, with no care as to whether the Batman in this flick represents early Batman or late Batman, or argue about whether Wonder Woman’s outfit fits into the Silver age or the Golden age. I have little to no knowledge of these things, nor do I care.
So having said that, I confess that I wanted to really like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I didn’t want to be a hater. I have always found Ben Affleck mediocre, and I wanted him to be great. I really liked Henry Cavill in The Man From U.N.C.L.E (one of last year’s cinema highlights) and I wanted him to pull a memorable Superman out of the bag. I wanted to walk out of the theater having been blown away and sit in front of my computer unable to convey how awesomely great this movie was.
‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’, has its moments, but generally fails to thrill. Here Superman (Henry Cavill), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and Batman (Ben Affleck) prepare to face off against Doomsday.
But about an hour into this film I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do that. I was bored, and more than a little annoyed. I was thinking that Director Zack Snyder and his writing staff must have thought I was pretty dumb, because they kept on laying on, over and over again, how angry Bruce Wayne / Batman (Affleck) is at Clark Kent / Superman (Cavill) and how disapproving of Batman’s vigilantism Superman is. Yeah okay, they don’t like each other. Move along.
The first hour of the film, in fact, is really carried by the second-tier characters. Gal Gadot as Diana Prince / Wonder Woman is sexy, mysterious and downright intriguing. In the few scenes she shares with Affleck they have great chemistry together, and his curiosity toward her definitely drags us into wanting to know more. Amy Adams as Lois Lane pretty much drives the Superman side of the story forward while the man of steel himself sulks around in the background, and Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor is downright evil, at least for the first half of the film, and his character carries a malevolence truly worthy of a super-villain.
Gal Gadot’s introduction as ‘Wonder Woman’ is one of the highlights of ‘Dawn of Justice’.
Once we start to get to the point of the film, the battle between the two titular characters, however, things begin to change.
The Luthor character disintegrates into farce. In fact his manipulation of Batman and Superman to get them to fight is just downright silly. Given Superman’s extraordinary powers, there are countless ways this could have gone differently, without anyone getting hurt, but I guess he felt a ‘Bat-bruisin’ was the way to go.
With the excpetion of Luthor’s decline and the silliness of the plot that brought them to this point, the battle itself is actually pretty cool. Roughly half-way through the fight between the two heroes I realised that I really liked Ben Affleck’s Batman. This Batman, aging and filled with rage at the injustices he sees around him, is borderline psychotic and sees the demise of Superman as a lasting legacy that will justify the years of collaring the muck of Gotham. The Bat Vigilante is intelligent, skilled and feeling oh so vengeful that I truly believe he could scare young children watching this film. The Batfleck works, and is by some way the best thing about this movie.
Superman (Henrey Cavill) has possibly bitten off more than he can chew when he confronts Batman (Ben Affleck).
So after much boredom and annoyance, we have a thrilling fight to the near-death between the two most iconic super-heroes of any universe. At its conclusion, they kiss and make up, and then it’s off to fight Luthor’s creation, Doomsday.
The Doomsday battle is the true introduction of Wonder Woman, and she doesn’t disappoint. Unfortunately, however, after the raging battle between Batman and Superman, the battle between our three heroes (Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman) and Doomsday turns out to be a bit of a letdown. Watching Affleck and Cavill go toe-to-toe was one thing. Watching them fight a CGI’d Doomsday was, unfortunately, not in the same ball-park. The editing is confusing, the action a little rambled, and the outcome just a little too predictable.
Elsewhere, the introduction of a group of other ‘meta-humans’ (The Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg) into the story-line was unnecessarily sloppy and did no justice (pardon the pun) to their characters. These characters could easily have been introduced in the next planned film, and would have saved this film from having to throw too many different ideas into the mix. I know there are people who will defend their introduction as being important to the ‘Justice League’ story going forward, but to me it simply diluted an already thin story-line and added running time to a movie that, if anything, needed to be shorter and tighter. Don’t mistake convoluted for depth. This is an incredibly simple story that takes two-and-a-half hours to tell, and all the hidden shout outs to the DC Universe and the introduction of future characters / story-lines doesn’t make it any more meaningful.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice doesn’t live up to the hype. It has its moments, and Affleck and Gadot are excellent, but it is far too drawn out. Its attempts at spoon-feeding us such a simple story makes for a boring hour or so before the action kicks in, and the pay-off at the end isn’t quite enough for us to forgive its failures.
Verdict: 6.5 / 10 – Thrilling for a short time, but for the most part laborious. A necessary evil for those interested in catching future ‘Justice League’ movies.
From the Cheap Seats 