Thursday, March 24, 2016
FILM REVIEW
‘Batman v Superman’
Rating: PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, and some sensuality.”
Running time: 2:32
Grade: Two and a half stars out of four.
By Jake Coyle
AP Film Writer
Zac Snyder’s thundering and grim “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” offers the kind of blunt, mano-a-mano face-off usually reserved for Predators, Godzillas and presidential candidates.
And just as has often been said of this election year, “Batman v Superman” takes a once almost charming tradition and plunges it into the gutter. Long gone are the telephone booths, corn fields or any other such tokens of innocence. And given the prevailing climate, Snyder may have judged the rock-’em-sock-’em moment wisely. Gentlemen, keep your fists up and your capes neatly tucked.
“Batman v Superman,” as heavy and humorless as a Supreme Court decision, is an 18-wheeler of a movie lumbering through a fallen world. It hurtles not with the kinetic momentum of “Mad Max: Fury Road” nor the comparatively spry skip of a Marvel movie, but with an operatic grandeur it sometimes earns and often doesn’t.
After a handsome, impressionistic montage of Batman’s iconic childhood, the film picks up where Snyder’s Superman reboot, “Man of Steel,” left off but from a different perspective. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) is driving through the falling debris of Metropolis while Superman (Henry Cavill) careens carelessly above.
Snyder has channeled the backlash over the high death-toll finale into Wayne, who bitterly watches Superman from the dust-filled air on the ground – a cheap evocation of Sept. 11 designed to add solemnity where there isn’t any.
At a party thrown by Lex Luthor (the badly miscast Jesse Eisenberg), the billionaire-inventor who’s secretly weaponizing Kryptonite, their two alter-egos are surprisingly passive-aggressive. Luthor’s plot gradually brings the heroes into the same orbit, along with Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot).