Not beating around the bush here with that title. I was bored last night, and looking for a movie to rent on Amazon, so I went looking for superhero movies I'd missed when they were in theaters. My first two choices, Captain America: Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse, weren't out yet, and Deadpool felt a little expensive for something I'd seen on the plane, so I swallowed hard and went for Batman Vs Superman.
I'm not even going to bother putting up the spoiler guy for this. It's a bad movie. It's badly acted, badly scripted, badly directed and has lackluster CGI. Someone comes back from the future, completely out of the blue, to warn Batman not to let Lois Lane die, and then it turns out to be a dream. Jesse Eisenberg plays Lex Luthor as if the character's a merger between Mark Zuckerberg and the Joker.
Compared to this, Suicide Squad was a work of art.
What's frustrating is that, in theory at least, I like David Goyer (who script doctored BvS). He wrote Batman Begins, which while not my favorite Batman story, at least got the character back on an even keel after Batman & Robin. He also has some good insights into the character - my favorite is how Goyer once pointed out that there are three facets to Batman/Bruce Wayne's personality: there's the public face of Bruce Wayne, the public (sorta) face of Batman, and the private Bruce Wayne, who's actually a badass.
In fairness to Goyer, the fact he rewrote the script means we were probably saved from something really brain-damaging... or it could have been to shoehorn more prep for the upcoming Justice League movie. Whatever.
The problem is that it could have been really good, if they'd just stuck with what's so good about the characters (including Wonder Woman), or even just added some horsepower to the action scenes. It seems odd to say about a movie that cost something like $200 million and features the destruction of two cities, but the action scenes are so boring - I know I can't seem to shut about the Fast & Furious movies, but at least they're exciting. The one car chase here looks like it was filmed underwater.
Funnily enough, though everybody was freaking out about him in the role, Ben Affleck as Batman wasn't the worst thing about the movie. In fact, I'll go so far as to say he was fine - he didn't have the unctuous playboy act down as well as Christian Bale in his prime, but I found him believable as both Batman and Bruce Wayne. And they solved the Bat-voice problem which had plagued the Nolan films.
Of course, it's still one of the top 50 highest-grossing movies of all time, despite losing 81% of revenues in its second weekend and a further 50% in the third. There's always been the impression that nerds are so starved for movies that cater to them that they'll lap up any old crap, and it's hard not to get the impression that this is why BvS has done so well (it didn't hit its projected $1 billion but it certainly recouped its budget). I also remember seeing some friends on Facebook taking issue with the blog posts (including ones I shared) saying that they didn't actually have to go see it - it's almost as bad as the fans of Suicide Squad who (Donald Trump-style) tried to ignore Rotten Tomatoes for giving their beloved movie a low score.
I read once that blockbusters are badly written because there's no compelling reason (whether in terms of cost or profit) for them to be written well. But I can still hope that someday someone decides to put out a superhero movie that doesn't suck quite this blatantly.
Or, screw it, just let me re-watch all the Fast & Furious movies while I wait for number 8 to come out. At least I'll enjoy myself.
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