A review by Forrest Humphrey
The 2010's gave us a hell of a lot of comic book movies, and some of them were fantastic, like “Captain America: Winter Soldier”, “Dredd” and my personal favorite film of the decade, “Logan”. Many were solid, perfectly serviceable flicks to enjoy on a weekend afternoon. But some of them were also atrocious, like “Fantastic Four”, “X-Men Apocalypse” and “Suicide Squad.” But there is one that is so bad in so many ways that I move from simply tossing it in the bin and moving on, to actually hating it. Hate is a strong emotion, and even films I consider extremely poor like “Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom” or “The Predator” I don't actually outright hate them....okay I might hate “The Predator” a little bit.
“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” is hands down one of the worst films I have ever seen, but it goes beyond being poorly written, poorly conceived or taking influence from the worst possible sources. It brought comic fans to the same kind of anger something like “The Last Jedi” brought to many fans of that franchise: anger born from seeing characters you love, that mean something to you, butchered.
The film has few merits so I'll just go ahead and get those out of the way. Ben Affleck, for all the rage that spawned from his casting, was hands down the best live-action Batman we've ever gotten and the 'warehouse fight' is easily the best Batman-related action sequence the character was ever filmed in. Wonder Woman's theme was also a banger in an otherwise surprisingly forgettable score from Hans Zimmer. And Jeremy Irons as Alfred does provide some dry charm.
But outside that, watching Superman brood, whine and contemplate giving up on heroics entirely speaks of a studio that either did not understand the character or doesn't think the character is worth adapting as s/he has been traditionally depicted. Given how many people Batman kills in the film, I'm inclined to think they just had no idea what concepts are and are not sacred to these characters. Batman does not kill people, Superman does not ponder if being a good person is possible or not. And good god the less said about Jesse Eisenberg's absolute monstrosity of a performance as Alexander Luther the better, I have no idea to this day what anyone was going for when they wrote that character into the script. He is so unlike his namesake I almost felt like they wanted this giggling idiot troll child to be Joker and changed it at the last minute.
The only person's motive I understood at all was Batman's: Superman's fights cause tons of collateral damage (frankly I think the meme about Godzilla doing a better job avoiding damage in the 2014 film than Superman does is true) and he is a threat that must be dealt with. That might have worked if Superman were constantly getting into huge battles but aside from his debut film's fight with Zod, he's only seen saving people, averting disasters and even agreeing to appear before congress to be peaceful in his efforts to allay concern, ergo Batman's paranoia doesn't make much sense. I would say at least they didn't ruin Wonder Woman but only because her part wasn't big enough to ruin anything.
But if there was one thing, just one thing they needed to nail, it was the namesake of the film. The fight, the big title match between Batman and Superman, the scene the entire film is building to. Its sucks, the fight is slow, plodding, and makes minimal use of either character's specialties given Batman's thing is “use kryptonite to weaken superman and punch him a lot” and abut the third or fourth time one character slowly heaved the other up and threw them awkwardly through a wall I was snoring. Where's the multi purpose batarangs, the ice breath, the crazy grapple gun vs flight acrobatics? Its just a slug fest confined to a single building when both these characters can do so, so much more.
And well, one can't talk about this film without “Martha”, the moment Batman becomes Superman's total bro because their moms have the same name. There's nothing I can even say about how stupid this is at this point, but its just so, well, stupid that you can't NOT bring up “WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME!?”
And its all so dreary, grimy and joyless. Logan did so much better at both being a viciously gritty comic book film AND breaking it up with moments of levity and strong character beats. I think there's one joke in the whole film from Martha Kent. One joke, in a movie with freaking Superman in it.
Before I wrap up I did want to touch one something I mentioned earlier, about this film taking the worst possible sources of inspiration. When this film was announced with a quote from Frank Miller's “The Dark Knight Returns” I already knew the film was in trouble, that it would be overly grim, miserable and edgy. Then the finale brings in “Death of Superman” when Clark heroically sacrifices himself to kill Doomsday, who was shoved into the film so clunkily that the only reason I can think they did it was so there could be a big monster for our trio of heroes to fight. These may have been seminal stories for the characters thirty years ago, but neither is now. “Death of Superman” especially is literally just pages of Superman and a not-Hulk punching each other to death because DC thought killing Superman would be a great stunt at the time and it DID work to their credit. But its worth noting that even in Frank Miller's book, Batman wasn't blowing up trucks full of people.
This look back ended up more a rant than the more professional stance I try to take with my contributions to the blog but as I said at the start, I don't just think this film is terrible, I hate it. Thinking about it makes me angry, and given Warner Bros. recently stated they have no idea how to make Superman relevant to today's audience (because the story of an immigrant trying to do the right thing despite facing fear and bigotry who's arch nemesis is literally a corrupt, evil CEO is somehow not relevant in today's society) tells me they STILL don't know what they're doing. But hey, Wonder Woman and Shazam were pretty good; Shazam is actually pretty much what I want out of a Superman movie. So maybe they'll figure this out some day.
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