God these DC movies are just so…dour. I am no fan of the MCU, as you know, but every time I watch one of these DC movies from the teens I think the MCU has really stumbled onto something. They may be dumb, but they’re usually at least moderately entertaining. But these films are just so unrelentingly dour (and drab). This one is long, boring, hilariously dark (in terms of how it looks) and pretty damn stupid.

The movie starts off with yet another Batman origin story. It’s mercifully brief, but it’s still there. And given that there is nothing else about Batman’s origin story, it’s not really helpful until the really silly moment at the pseudo climax.

The movie gets going with a plausible reason for Batman wanting Superman dead. But then, inexplicably, they jump ahead 18 months so that the raw emotion he was experiencing should have dissipated. Why? Who knows? When they finally fight, it feels so forced, so unnecessary, so dumb. We’re supposed to believe that Batman is this stupid? If he’s just blinded by rage why did he wait this long? (I haven’t read these comics but I hope they did a better job of this manufactured conflict there.)

There are enough things wrong with this movie that I forgot a bunch of them because I didn’t take notes. Perhaps the biggest problem, beyond the usual stuff that doesn’t make sense because it’s a comic book film, is the lack of humour. I think I laughed once, and it was close to 2 hours into the movie. Regardless of the issues I have with the MCU, I will say they have actual jokes in their films. But not in this humourless, joyless world. That was mostly tolerable in the Nolan films because, well, they’re better movies but also because there are a couple of jokes in those films, even just a couple. But the “comic relief” here doesn’t exist – it’s Jesse Eisenberg doing some weird Luthor-Joker hybrid thing with no script to work with.

To think, there are people who like these movies and who were mad that the sequel to this one was only 2 hours.

4/10