BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (Zack Snyder). 151 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (March 25). Rating: N
Wow. It’s worse than I’d feared.
The superhero smackdown Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice plays like a DeviantArt version of a DC Comics movie – gloomy, self-serious and grotesque for no other reason than a talented artist thought it would look cool.
And make no mistake, director/producer Zack Snyder is a talented artist, able to conjure an eerie mythic resonance from characters who’ve been around for eight decades. But even as he’s doing so, you slowly realize that he doesn’t understand these characters at all.
After Man Of Steel, this is confirmation that Snyder is the wrong person to steer a Superman movie, let alone two, but the real surprise is that he’s just as ill-suited to tackle Batman, whose obsessive seriousness needs to be leavened with a touch of self-aware wit. Ben Affleck should be able to deliver that in his sleep, but I’m assuming those takes were left in the edit bay, deemed unsuitable for the film’s overall vision. Even the reliably sardonic Alfred isn’t allowed to ground Master Bruce with witty admonishments. Why hire Jeremy Irons if you’re not going to let him be Jeremy Irons?
This is why: Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice is a movie with a mission, and that mission has nothing to do with serving its characters. Rather, it’s here to introduce an entire universe – the DC Cinematic Universe – by randomly slapping pieces together until it has something that looks like a movie.
As a result, the audience is always ahead of the movie’s characters. We know what Kryptonite is, we know Lex Luthor is an evil mastermind, we know the true identity of that mysterious woman (Gal Gadot) who keeps turning up at parties to fluster Bruce Wayne. And thanks to Warner’s marketing strategy, most of us even know what the Justice in the movie’s subtitle is referring to.
But that means the movie takes forever to get to the fireworks factory, spinning its wheels with a subplot about Congressional hearings on Superman’s activities in a foreign nation that also ties in to the 9/11ing of Metropolis in Man Of Steel. I’m not exactly sure how it all fits together, but that’s not a problem: the movie cares about it even less than I do.
Snyder approaches this universe with the same clenched determination he brought to his epic adaptation of Watchmen seven years ago – and while it was perfect for that material, it just doesn’t fly here.
Henry Cavill still makes a good Superman and a great Clark Kent, but the plot of BvS necessitates he be shoved off screen for long stretches – along with Amy Adams’s better-this-time-around Lois Lane – so Snyder can set the table for the entire DC Cinematic Universe.
Screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer are also tasked with incorporating two very different chunks of DC lore, and those chunks do not fit together at all, which leaves the narrative whiplashing back and forth until it disintegrates in an incomprehensible orgy of CG destruction.
Yes, Wonder Woman is in there – and no, it doesn’t matter worth a damn, because her appearance is undercut by a guitar riff straight out of the Bill & Ted movies. This is no way to run a franchise.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
