Review of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) by Patricia W — 29 Sep 2017

Be prepared before you sit down to watch this film because although it's 2 1/2 hours long it feels so much longer. Okay, to be fair this film let's start with the positives. Henry Cavill as Superman and Ben Afleck as Batman both put in decent performances and that's true across the board bar one character in particular and the soundtrack is quite good and adds some weight to the film at important moments.

Gal Gadot was also a highlight of the film as Wonder Woman but unfortunately her appearance was completely spoiled by the trailers and she is woefully underused throughout the film. This isn't a truly awful film but it has a lot of problems and will come as a great disappointment to a lot of viewers.

So on to the negatives, first of all, the whole premise of the film, Batman and Superman fighting against one another is what we all want to see in the film right? They don't even meet each other until an hour and a half into the movie, which would be fine if there was some exciting build up to the event but what we're given is a bloated, boring storyline that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Batman supposedly hates Superman in this film because he has accidentally killed people during his battles in Man of Steel but in this film Bruce Wayne seems to have forgotten his morals about guns and killing and mows people down with reckless abandon.

Whereas with Superman, it seems the writers couldn't come up with a reason for him to fight so they use a very weak hostage plot to get him to engage in battle with Batman. Another issue I had with this film was Jesse Eisenberg's questionable acting choices as Lex Luthor.

Lex Luthor is supposed to be an intelligent, charismatic, power mad business magnate but Jesse Eisenberg plays him like a poor man's Joker, who would be more at home with Jim Carrey's Riddler than in a film with such a serious tone.

Finally, one of the most irritating things about the film is how they try to shoe horn The Justice League into it. Rather that building up characters over time in separate films so that they can eventually join together to fight as a team or organically introducing them into the plot, DC just drops the rest of the team in the middle of the film like sack of potatoes.

They are all presented in some silly downloaded clips that makes them look like cheap online hoaxes rather than superheroes we'd want to see in future films. Overall, if you are fan of Superman and Batman you're probably going to be disappointed by this film and you'd be better off watching Captain America Civil War instead.