Well, here it finally is, the comic book fan boys' wet dream. And appositely a sticky mess. The film bends over backwards to achieve the implausible fight between DC's biggest hero guns, and having achieved that, suddenly realises they have to pal up
subito to deal with the villains. There is far too much time wasted on meandering towards this, with Batman's origin story yet again inexplicably filling up screen time, while Jeremy Irons doing his stint as a sardonic and weary Alfred, on the other hand, is criminally underused. Then there's Jesse Eisenberg not so much channelling as karaokeing Ledger's jittery and psychotic Joker in the Lex Luthor role, a pointless digression mid-action where the next characters in the franchise chain are set up through having Wonder Woman look at computer files - yes, really - and a monster at the finale who could just as well as ogre #373 in the background of some
Lord of the Rings scene. The script also manages to ransack the bits from the Batman and Superman histories that are probably of the richest dramatic potential - i.e. the
Dark Knight Returns graphic novel and the death of Superman story line, thus ensuring they can never be done properly again, while leaving us none the wiser to anyone's motivations, least of all Luthor, who just seems to want Superman dead because he's nuts, not because there's some grand plan.
It's a pity because if you listen carefully enough, there's some pithy dialogue tucked in amongst the bombastics, and the cast is brimming with quality. As for the characters, Batman should really be rescued from this, scurrying around like a mouse between giant explosions by the end with sod-all else to do. It's dismaying to see that Christopher Nolan is along as executive producer; his moody creation deserves better than this ignominy, which will only get worse with the silly sequels coming up.
4/10
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