Critics reviews

Snyder flunks the world-building assignments aced by lesser stylists under contract to Marvel. BvS comes at us in big, unwieldy chunks of exposition laced with grandiose juvenilia, the latter personified by Lex Luthor, whose plans are so simultaneously vague and convoluted that the arrival of some blurry monster or other to enact destruction comes almost as a relief . . . that is until his rampage eats up what feels like an hour of screen time on top of the protracted, eponymous bout.

One can feel Snyder aiming for an obsessive masterpiece while attempting to please investors with the expository generality that's required of global blockbusters. The film wants to be a treatise on How We Live, dabbling in incredible religious iconography and glancing infrastructural signifiers, yet it can't commit to any specific view for fear of alienating consumers.

When it was over, I, too, was overcome with the urge to brood, mope and cultivate stubble I could ponderously stroke while asking, "What's the most ridiculous thing about this movie?" Maybe it's that a fight between Batman and Superman is fundamentally illogical. (Uh, he's super, man.) Maybe it's that the fights are treated with onerous seriousness by real scientists, journalists, cable-news bigmouths and sitting senators.

Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent are mama's boys. That's one of the two insights that went into the making of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the other being that Jesse Eisenberg's turn as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network could be repurposed as Lex Luthor. The film's only other notable ingredients, sadly, are the most rumbling soundtrack since Earthquake, a lot of jaw grinding by Ben Affleck, [and] some narrative confusion remarkable even by director Zack Snyder's standards.

Where the grand scenographic universe of "Man of Steel" conjures a turbulent swirl of passions, "Batman v Superman" suggests a restraint on passion overall and endorses, as a prime virtue, the masked blandness of heroes who don't put on much of a show, and the modesty that such blandness implies. The fact that Snyder makes that point with a spectacle of uninhibited bombast is a self-critique as strong as any reproach that a critic can levy.

Every time I review a superhero movie these days, the teenage Marvel obsessive that I once was always nudges me to protest that honestly, on some level, I really, really want to enjoy one of these things, but it rarely happens (I didn't mind Ant-Man, though). Yet I've never felt so bored, so brutalized, or just given so little to work with as in this cacophonous, joyless slurry, which out-bombasts even the most meaninglessly bombastic genre entries we've seen to date.

Worse even than the useless story elements is the terrible action. Snyder's never been one to make ugly films, but here he's inexplicably ditched his patented speed-ramping tableaux for chaotic handheld and constant edits, which makes even less sense given that vast chunks of this film are almost entirely virtual. Why make choices when you can be an indecipherable CGI smear? It's enough to make one long for the relative stylistic coherence of a Michael Bay Transformers.

Batman V Superman is at least a marked improvement on 2013's atrocious Man of Steel, the hackneyed Biblical cut-n-paste job in which the similarities between Supes and Christ were rammed into our face like so many expired communion wafers. Where that film didn't even operate as a satisfying trailer, this one at least gets the levels right and dutifully escorts us from A to B For Snyder, it's among his better films, even though it doesn't offer a single memorable image or idea.

The drab, monotonous fight-and-destruction spectacle of Man of Steel carries over here, and Batman's tooled-up, homicidal vengeance-mania goes even beyond the off-model, murderous Superman to make these heroes as unredeemable as the Punisher. This is a superhero film which opens and closes with funerals and requires the world's finest detective and an avatar of truth and justice to batter each other (and everyone else) senseless for two-and-a-half hours.

For about an hour, Dawn of Justice moves with irresistible confidence through its byzantine and ultimately pointless narrative, painting a detailed portrait of a world where indistinct strains of liberal-humanist optimism and nativistic cynicism gird for battle... But by the time its main bout arrives, Dawn of Justice has become a fait accompli—a fearsomely expansive primer for a coming decade of Justice League-related origin stories and crossover adventures.

Rather than focusing on a cataclysmic showdown between pop culture's most famous men in tights, Zack Snyder's flashy, cacophonous follow-up to 2013's "Man of Steel" is basically one long teaser for the next installment. Next fall's "Justice League: Part One" has plenty of plot details set in motion by this dreary spectacle, but doesn't fare as well in the department of good ideas. As its title implies, "Batman v Superman" plays like a mashup of things we've seen before.

Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice is state of the art epic superhero filmmaking. That's a compliment if you prefer these movies to be ponderous, disorganized and glum, but a warning if you prefer tonal variation from film to film and scene to scene, and have a soft spot for storytelling that actually tells, you know, a story, as opposed to doing an occasionally inspired but mostly just competent job of setting up the next chapter in a Marvel-styled franchise.