The last decade and a half have given us so many superhero films
they've become a full-fledged genre in their own right. Rapidly
evolving CG tech and big investors like Disney have transformed the
comic book-movie, once a dodgy prospect for even the most solvent
studio, into a cornerstone of the international box office; a
budget-saving big stick every Brylcreemed exec aspires to have in his
back pocket. Most of these flicks, happily, have been good. A few
fell short (Amazing Spider-Man),
some wandered and lost focus (The Wolverine),
and a handful even surprised us for being WAY better than they had
any right to be (Guardians of the Galaxy).
But most were good, and the ones that were better than
good, well, they made us dyed-in-the-wool geeks swell up with a pride
that could almost be described as parental. Our little corner of the
universe had made it to center stage and they liked it; they really
liked it! Alas, there's a
hidden danger to such a stellar track record: it breeds complacence,
and it skews perspective. When the bar is set at a perpetual seven,
how does one recognize true greatness even when it's staring one in
the face? More to the point, how does one recognize a real loser, an
Edsel, a craptacular pile of crap, a superlative boner that never
should have breathed free air, when one of those
comes a calling?
That's why I thank Zach Synder.
For no one man has better filled the role of devil's advocate of the
cape-'n-spandex genre than he, thanks to his consistently monstrous
offerings of five-alarm, turd-powered dreck. With 300 we
thought we might have found an idiot savant – he handled that
sweaty testosterone-fest ably enough with Frank Miller holding his
hand (and racked up more reviews with the word 'spattered' as an
adjective than ever mine virgin orbs have beheld since). By the time
we reached Watchmen we
suspected we were dealing with a more garden-variety idiot. Man
of Steel all but confirmed it,
giving us a Superman who moped and brooded through 2-plus hours of
constipated nonsense and Christ allusions so bald-faced I expected
Clark Kent to have stigmata. But Batman versus
Superman:Dawn of Justice brings
it home true: this is the bar at a big, fat one.
And Zach Synder is awful. And this movie is awful, and no amount of
wordsmithing on the part of Yours Truly can express it better than
that.
Not that I won't try.
The film is such a mess it's almost
impossible to structure a review. How do I examine it chronologically
from start to finish when the plot made no sense? How do I start big
– targeting only the most egregious sins – and work my way down
to the quibbles when it was all
an egregious sin and the smallest quibble still constitutes a
rage-inducing trespass fit to make grown men weep? It's a quandary.
But to succeed, I must do something that Zach Synder didn't
do with BvS: I
must make an effort.
It can't be a secret any more what
happened behind closed doors at Warner Brothers: Man of
Steel had underperformed –
badly – grossing less than $700 million worldwide, falling well
short of 2009's other tentpole comic-flick Iron Man 3,
which logged a cool $1 billion-plus on a listless script and Gwyneth
Paltrow's abs. Superman – that's SU-PER-MAN, couldn't carry the
day, so it was time for WB's only sure thing, the Batman, to save his
– and their – collective butts. We couldn't know just how
bad a demotion the Son of
Krypton received until the projectors rolled on the follow-up, which
sees the Dark Knight claiming not only the lion's share of the screen
time (and a 1st
credit-listing for Ben Affleck), but also every one of the best
lines, action sequences, and set pieces. Indeed, Superman is almost
an afterthought, hardly necessary at all save as a standoffish foil
at whom Bruce Wayne can shake his fist until the much-ballyhooed
fight in the second act. This is the Man of Steel at his least manly
or steely, a wincing, knock-kneed killjoy who wouldn't inspire a
drunk to drink, much less ordinary people to make heroic choices.
His handful of 'super' moments are ruined by Synder's ham-fisted
photography, saturating the action with haloed backlight and enough
slow-mo to expose the glut of who-gives-a-shit CG that renders every
scene a study in cartoonish fakery. So forget any hope that you'll
root for Superman; I rooted for the fire alarm to go off, and that
was only the beginning of my disappointment.
So, in brief: the wholesale
slaughter at Metropolis ground zero last film inspires Wayne, now a
20-year man in the cowl (and still an urban myth [?]) to challenge
Superman on behalf of all humanity. He lifts a lot of weights and
absconds with a chunk of kryptonite with the intent of flat-out
murdering another person because he's not 'one of us' and he might be
a threat later on. For the sake of brevity, I'll ignore how many
fundamental contradictions that arrangement reveals in the character
of Batman, to the point where at times it feels we're looking at a
purely speculative Elseworlds
version of the Dark Knight, a Batman who willingly exposes himself to
public discovery and jeopardizes his own quest to go off on a
childish bug hunt more likely to kill innocents than save them.
Affleck, God bless him, does his best with what he's given, which is
damn little. He captures the brooding pathos of the Dark Knight
admirably well, and stays true to this version of the character
throughout. He's helped along by Jeremy Irons, one of a handful
of stoic British thespians, like previous Alfred Michael Caine, who
could add gravitas to a public phone book reading. Points for
writing and playing him as more of world-weary veteran instead of a
fussing den mother – this is an Alfred who is long past trying to
convince Wayne to give up the fight and is more interested in helping
his master improve combat effectiveness. In their down moments
they drink alcohol and talk shop like old soldiers and rattle off a
handful of lines from The Dark Knight Returns,
thus ensuring Snyder fell asleep with a shit-eating grin at the end
of each day's filming.
Things fall apart the instant Lex
Luthor is introduced. He is supposed to
be the author of a grandiose anti-Superman plot, the cogs and gears
of which are too numerous for mere mortals (or movie-goers) to
decipher, but his approach is so labyrinthine and the script so
shoddily assembled it is almost impossible to determine what
constituted his original plan, his Plan B, his on-the-fly
improvisations, and what we're told was
his true, ultra-ultra SUPER genius plan all along. He wants
kryptonite, Batman wants it worse, so he steals the corpse of General
Zod instead, and whether that was supposed to happen or whether it
was just a goose-poop slick means of introducing Doomsday, we'll
probably never know. Adding by volumes and degrees to our torment is
Jessie Eisenberg as Lex, who spent every second of his too-generous
screen time invoking Tweak from South Park, playing the classic
arch-villain as a spazzing, tic-riddled crackbaby who belongs not in
mansion but safety mittens and a padded helmet.
 |
| Separated at birth? |
So, they fight. Even that is a
disappointment, as by the time the film painfully, achingly gets
around to it, the motivation of the contenders has become so muddled
in cross-purposed subplots and scattershot cutaways you truly don't
understand why they're doing it at all. The only thing worse is the
horror-inducing revelation that, when the fight is over, there is
still 40 minutes left in the film. Some of that is spent – wasted
– on the tacked-on DC Universe-building, in which we are introduced via surveillance
tapes and found footage to The Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg, thus
seeding the franchise for future Avengers-style
team-ups. It produces a feeling of bathos I've not encountered in a
film in years, a sudden jarring shift from the deadly serious into a
laughable sidebar of super-cameos. By then, there are simply no
fucks left to give. A better film and a better filmmaker would have
staged this segment to elicit awe and excitement; here it is merely
uncomfortably funny, like watching a nun slip on floor wax.
Wonder Woman is there. She has about a dozen lines and there's some
foreshadowing of her solo film. We see an old black-and-white photo
of her from WWI and go “Is that...is that Chris Pine?” Yeah, it
is. No one cares. She joins in the fight with Doomsday. Her shield
can't be broken, her lasso can't be undone, and her sword cleaves
through the juggernaut's limbs like a laser scalpel. The only
'wonder' here is why she can't simply cut the guy's head off and be
done with it. I give exactly one prop to Gal Gadot for enduring
Doomsday's barreling fists with a self-satisfied smirk, something
Wonder Woman is known for in the comics. That's about it.
In the end we're supposed to come
away with the notion that Darkseid is coming and that only a League
of Justice will prevail in the face of his darkling machinations.
Supposedly the Flash shows up in a dream sequence (or time
travel-induced hallucination), warning Batman of the coming struggle.
Word of advice to Synder: if you're going to tease another iconic DC
superhero - one who has his own TV show, for God's sake – make him
recognizable. The Asian with the wispy beard and five-o'cock shadow
covered in armor is not any Flash I recognize, and I had to have a
complete stranger tell me who it was supposed to be. This movie is
that bad, folks.
Much has been said already of this
film's joylessness. More deserves to be said, for it is pervasive, a
pall, a miasma of enervating gloom that weighs on you like jury duty
on an empty stomach. We see Thomas and Martha Wayne die – again –
not once but twice, in slow-motion, then half-slow-motion, the camera
lingering on every bullet casing and broken pearl string like it's a
college art project. The temptation to stand up at the start of Hour
Two and scream “For God's sake, it's a comic book,
people!!!” is overpowering.
We get it, we get it, Jeezus, Zach, we get it. It's
not easy to make a PG-13 film pornographic, but you'll see it here,
in spades. It might be
forgivable if it had a purpose, but there is no
purpose to this movie save to indulge Snyder's massive, unjustifiably
huge ego. He over-tries with every tired frame, browbeating us with
his bloated pap at every mortifying turn, viciously insulting our
intelligence more with every agonizing minute. The studio stepped
not one foot outside of their echo chamber for this one, convinced,
it seems, of the right-ness of their misguided efforts. But their
tunnel-vision has served only to drive another nail – and it's a
big one – in the Warner Brothers/DC coffin.
Ten dollars bills are wonderful for unclogging toilets. Spend your
next Hamilton on that instead of this. You'll thank me.
