Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Review

Crash of The Titans

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Director: Zach Snyder, Stars: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams

Batman v Superman www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk

♦ And so the vaunted behemoth arrives on our multiplex screens, surfing the usual welter of hyper-aggressive marketing campaigns and chatroom speculation. Batman Versus Superman is not just this year’s acid test of what passes for pop culture these days, it’s also the barometer of our attitude to such gargantuan, brasher-than-thou event flicks. The critics (“haters”, apparently) have gone for the jugular, and have been indignantly yelled at by the Twitteratti for their temerity and lack of understanding, while the fans have defensively claimed that, bloated bombast aside, this film is a triumph – after all, what is wrong with gritty realism, extreme violence and a complete absence of humour? Leave the lightweight banalities to Marvel! We want heavyweight banalities, dammit! Underpinning everything is the blanket obsession with box office, and the fear, primarily within fandom’s ranks, that this blockbuster won’t yield that axiomatically All-American holy grail – a franchise. A friend at the screening opined that the money was all on the screen. Perhaps, but that aforementioned behind the scenes marketing is all about the dedicated fan’s emotional investment being parried by the corporate brick wall of cynicism.

The plot is as follows – Eighteen months after the events that took place in The Man Of Steel movie, Batman (Ben Affleck) considers Superman (Henry Cavill) a menace after his apocalyptically destructive fight with General Zod, while Superman is equally wary of the Dark Knight. Lex Luthor, keen to undermine and destroy the Man Of Steel, attempts to locate Kryptonite from Zod’s failed terraforming. Using Senator Finch (Holly Hunter) Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) entraps Superman in a mass murder, causing him to go into exile. Batman finds the Kryptonite, threatens Superman with it and an apocalyptically destructive fight ensues. Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) also turns up at the end (hooray!), as well as Doomsday, Luthor’s indestructible, mega-sized catspaw.

For all its graphic grimness, it’s a slick, polished enterprise, with excellent cinematography and battle scenes, and although it’s cinema by committee, there are positive notes – Affleck’s pared down performance, all chest-puffery and machismo, is second only to Bale’s, while Cavill looks every inch the classic Superman of yore. One of the better contrivances in the film is the counterpoint between the two leads – there’s a sense of airbrushed unreality about Superman, even when he isn’t trashing Metropolis – he is more godlike here than in any previous iterations. While Affleck’s Batman is straight out of the pages of Dark Knight, all craggy, misshapen and dystopian – the monstrous, jagged costume very much wearing the actor. The supporting cast lack even the vaguest connection with their four colour counterparts, but this is a plus – humour and gaucheness have no place in this film, but sadly neither does wry philosophising (Jeremy Irons’s Alfred nabs the one truly memorable line in the film). And despite the mechanical nature of the beast, this is nevertheless a marginally better outing than Man Of Steel.

However, the critics (haters!!) have a point – the film, coming in at a little over 150 minutes, is lengthy and drawn out for its own sake. Accusations regarding the plot being unwieldy and disconnected are a little unfounded, but you’re still desperate for the third act to arrive, such is the need by Snyder and company to add their mandatory brittle subtext and sludgy extemporising, not to mention all the expressionist nightmares that torture our heroes. All the supporting cast are ciphers, including Lois Lane (Amy Adams) – but then nothing can stand in the way of the impending mega-slugfest that is the film’s denouement. Even worse than all of that, however, is Eisenberg’s Luthor – a petulant, pantomime version of Heath Ledger’s Joker. As intrinsically silly a super-villain as one might find, he’s nevertheless resolutely unfunny.

It’s not that this film hasn’t had some thought put into it – it has, but mainly in terms of how to tap current mores. Gone are the heroes that I recall from my teens, drawn by Adams, Aparo, Swan and Novick – the street-level detective and the benign, somewhat bland super-martinet who were best buddies and beloved by all. The film replaces them with Milleresque demagogues, and lets them quickly succumb to psychosis, cranking up the brutality considerably further than the source material. One brilliant review posited (correctly) that the story is told from Lex Luthor’s viewpoint – “power is never innocent”, he declaims, and neither Superman nor Batman are governed by an inner morality – here “justice” is vengeance. If there is a genuine subtext here, it’s alluded to by Perry White (Laurence Fishburne)’s assertion that “the American conscience died with Martin, Bobby and John”. So we are left with two heroes that were, not that long ago, unimpeachably decent yet are now reduced to merely their powers and weapons – they don’t stand for anything, because America, post 9/11, is beyond that, and the spectacle’s the thing, not rooting for the good guys.

Humour aside, a little irony wouldn’t’ve gone amiss in what is ultimately a presentable misfire – granted, no spandex movie will ever please everyone, but it can still be more than just a collection of trailers stitched together with some potboiler themes and a tepid script thrown in. That may sound harsh, but all that sound and fury signifies little.

Yet despite any misgivings it still plays, and is certainly one of the best DC super-hero movies, with some bravura set-pieces. It’s also considerably better than Avengers: Age Of Ultron. Which isn’t saying all that much.

ANDREW COLMAN

Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice is out in UK cinemas from today Friday 25 March.