As one of the most anticipated blockbuster movies of 2016, it was expected that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice would deliver an early box-office punch. Unfortunately, the superhero film seems to have been crippled by scads of negative, even eviscerating, reviews by movie critics. (Not that it’ll block fans from going to see it.)
Currently sitting at a not-so-good 32 per cent rating on RottenTomatoes.com, Superman and Batman should be hiding behind their capes right about now. The movie, which stars Ben Affleck as Batman and Henry Cavill reprising his role as the Man of Steel, has been called everything from “a tedious and disappointing bore” to a “very expensive reaction video.”
Here are some snippets of Batman v Superman reviews. (Don’t worry, there are no spoilers.)
From Polygon:
“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is such a bleak, disorienting and incoherent mess that despite the few promising moments that sporadically appear, it’s nearly impossible to enjoy.”
From The Telegraph:
“No major blockbuster in years has been this incoherently structured, this seemingly uninterested in telling a story with clarity and purpose. It grumbles along for what feels like forever, jinking from subplot to subplot, until two shatteringly expensive-looking fights happen back to back, and the whole thing crunches to a halt.”
From HitFix:
“I’m not sure how a filmmaker whose work normally speaks to me as clearly as Snyder’s does could deliver something that feels this confused, this impersonal, and this corporate. It is a confounding mess of a movie, and while there are individual sequences that I enjoyed as isolated moments, it is almost breathtakingly incoherent storytelling. Characters do what they do because the movie requires them to do it, not because they are behaving like characters at all. There’s no sense of voice to the film. I have no idea what I should think about Batman or Superman or Wonder Woman based on what I see here.”
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From The Verge:
“Batman v Superman addresses Man of Steel‘s problems in words without learning anything from it in tone. Instead, the new film doubles down on the grimness, the ugliness, and the indifference to human life.”
From the Chicago Tribune:
“A near-total drag, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice plays like a loose, unofficial quarter-billion-dollar remake of The Odd Couple, in which Oscar and Felix are literally trying to kill each other.”
From The Examiner:
“This is an extremely cluttered movie, filled with half-baked storylines that are thrown together into one big mess that tries to include far too much. This leaves too little time for each of them (yes, even for a film that runs for two and a half hours), turning what should have been a thrilling and unforgettable experience, into one that’s extremely dull and almost entirely forgettable. That’s no small feat for a film that contains what many consider to be the two greatest superheroes ever created, but somehow, they’ve managed to take these beloved characters and leave them stranded in a film that just doesn’t know what to do with them.”
From Las Vegas Weekly:
If you want to see more reviews of the movie, you can read them here.
‘Batman v Superman’ opens in theatres on March 25, 2016.