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Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
Batman and Superman have been a collision course for a while. The two most famous superheroes were once scheduled to combat in 2003. Then the budget got a tad too high for Warner Brothers’ liking and it was scrapped. Flash forward a decade and now it seems that money is no longer a stumbling point, especially as Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice cost an estimated $250 million dollars. I wasn’t a fan of director Zack Snyder’s first take on Superman, 2013’s Man of Steel, so I was tremendously wary when he was already tapped to direct its follow-up, as well as the inevitable follow-up follow-up with 2017’s Justice League. You see DC has epic plans to create its own universe of interlocked comics franchises patterned after Marvel’s runaway success. Instead of building to the super team-up, they’re starting with it and hoping one movie can kick off possibly half a dozen franchises. There’s a lot at stake here for a lot of people. That’s what make the end results all the more truly shocking. Batman vs. Superman isn’t just a bad movie, and I never thought I’d type these words, it’s worse than Batman and Robin.
Eighteen months after the cataclysmic events of Man of Steel, Metropolis is rebuilding and has an uneasy relationship with its alien visitor, Superman (Henry Cavill). Billionaire Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) is convinced that an all-powerful alien is a threat to mankind, especially in the wake of the dead and injured in Metropolis. But how does man kill a god? Enter additional billionaire Lex Luthor (Jessie Eisenberg) and his acquisition of a giant hunk of kryptonite. Bruce runs into a mysterious woman (Gail Gadot a.k.a. Wonder Woman) also looking into the secrets held within Luthor’s vaults. Clark Kent is pressing Wayne for comment on this bat vigilante trampling on civil liberties in nearby Gotham City, and Wayne is annoyed at the news media’s fawning treatment over an unchecked all-powerful alien. The U.S. Senate is holding hearings on what responsibilities should be applied to Superman. Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is worried that her boyfriend is getting too caught up in the wrong things. Lex Luthor is scheming in the shadows to set up one final confrontation that will eliminate either Batman or Superman, and if that doesn’t work he’s got a backup plan that could spell their doom.
I think it’s only fitting to tackle each of the particular heavyweights in this huge showdown and devote time to dressing down why exactly the movie fails them.
Let’s start with Batman because quite frankly he’s the character that the American culture prefers (his name even comes first in the title for a Superman sequel). Ben Affleck (Gone Girl) was at the bad end of unrelenting Internet fanboy-fueled scorn when the news came out that he was going to play the Caped Crusader, but he’s one of the best parts of this movie, or perhaps the better phrasing would be one of the least bad parts. He’s a much better Bruce Wayne than Batman but we don’t really get much of either in this movie from a character standpoint. There isn’t much room for character development of any sort with a plot as busy and incomprehensible as Batman vs. Superman, and so the movie often just relies upon the outsized symbolism of its mythic characters. We have a Batman who is Tough and Dark and Traumatized and looking for (Vigilante) Justice. We only really get a handful of scenes with Batman in action, and while there’s a certain entertainment factor to watching an older, more brutal Batman who has clearly given up the whole ethical resolve to avoid killing the bad guys, under Snyder’s attention, the character is lost in the action. The opening credits once again explain Batman’s origin story, a tale that should be burned into the consciousness of every consumer. We don’t need it, yet Snyder feels indebted to what he thinks a Batman movie requires. So he’s gruff, and single-minded, and angry, but he’s never complex and often he’s crudely rendered into the Sad Man Lashing Out. He’s coming to the end of his career in tights and he knows it, and he’s thinking about his ultimate legacy. That’s a great starting point that the multitude of live-action Batman cinema has yet to explore, but that vulnerability is replaced with resoluteness. He’s determined to kill Superman because Superman is dangerous, and also I guess because the Metropolis collateral damage crushed a security officer’s legs, a guy he’s never met before. The destructive orgy of Metropolis is an excellent starting point to explain Bruce Wayne’s fear and fury. I don’t know then why the movie treats Wayne as an extremist. I don’t really understand why there’s a memorial for the thousands who lost their lives in the Metropolis brawl that includes a statue of Superman. Isn’t that akin to the Vietnam Wall erecting a giant statue of a Vietcong soldier stabbing an American GI with a bayonet? This may be the most boring Batman has ever been onscreen, and I repeat, Ben Affleck is easily one of the best parts of this woefully begotten mess.
Next let’s look at the other titular superhero of the title, the Boy Scout in blue, Superman. The power of Superman lies with his earnest idealism, a factor that has always made him a tougher sell than the gloomy Batman. With Man of Steel, Warner Brothers tried making Superman more like Batman, which meant he was darker, mopey, theoretically more grounded, and adopted the same spirit of being crushed by the weight of expectations and being unable to meet them. Cavill (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) was a Superman who didn’t want to be Superman, where dear old Pa Kent advocated letting children drown rather than revealing his powers (Father’s Day must have been real awkward in the Kent household). It wasn’t a great step and I wrote extensively about it with Man of Steel. The problem is that Superman and Batman are supposed to be contradictory and not complimentary figures. If one is brooding and the other is slightly more brooding, that doesn’t exactly create a lot of personal and philosophical conflicts now does it? It clearly feels that Snyder and everybody really wanted to make a Batman movie and Superman just tagged along. Superman clearly doesn’t even want to be Superman in the Superman sequel, often looking at saving others with a sigh-inducing sense of duty. He’s still working as a journalist and making moral arguments about the role of the media, which seems like a really lost storyline considering the emphasis on blood and destruction. He wants Superman to be seen as a force of good even if others deify him. That’s a powerfully interesting angle that’s merely given lip service, the concept of what Superman’s impact has on theology and mankind’s relationship to the universe and its sense of self. Imagine the tectonic shifts acknowledging not only are we not alone but we are the inferior race. We get a slew of truly surprising cameos for a superhero movie arguing this debate (Andrew Sullivan?) but then like most else it’s dropped. Clark is trying to reconcile his place in the world but he’s really just another plot device, this time a one-man investigation into this bat vigilante guy. The other problem with a Batman v. Superman showdown is that Superman is obviously the superior and would have to hold back to make it thrilling. We already know this Superman isn’t exactly timid about killing. The climax hinges on a Batman/Superman connection that feels so trite as to be comical, and yet Snyder and company don’t trust the audience enough to even piece that together and resort to a reconfirming flashback.
Arguably the most problematic area of a movie overwhelmed with problems and eyesores, Eisenberg’s (Now You See Me) version of Lex Luthor is a complete non-starter. He is essentially playing his Mark Zuckerberg character but with all the social tics cranked higher. His socially awkward mad genius character feels like he’s been patched in from a different movie (Snyder’s Social Network?) and his motivation is kept murky. Why does he want to pit Batman and Superman against each other? It seems he has something of a god complex because of a nasty father. He is just substantially disappointing as a character, and his final scheme, complete with the use of an egg timer for wicked purposes, is so hokey that it made me wince. If you’re going with this approach for Lex then embrace it and make it make sense. Late in the movie, Lex Luthor comes across a treasure-trove of invaluable information, and yet he does nothing substantive with this except create a monster that needs a super team-up to take down (this plot point was already spoiled by the film’s marketing department, so I don’t feel guilty about referring to it). If you’re working with crafty Lex, he doesn’t just gain leverage and instantly attack. This is a guy who should be intricately plotting as if he was the John Doe killer in Seven. This is a guy who uses his intelligence to bend others to his will. This Lex Luthor throws around his ego, nattering social skills, and force-feeds people Jolly Ranchers. This is simply a colossal miscalculation that’s badly executed from the second he steps onscreen. The movie ends up being a 150-minute origin story for how Lex Luthor loses his hair.
The one character that somewhat works is Wonder Woman and this may be entirely due to the fact that her character is in the movie for approximately twenty minutes. Like Lois, she has little bearing on the overall plot, but at least she gets to punch things. I was skeptical of Gadot (Triple 9) when she was hired for the role that should have gone to her Furious 6 co-star, Gina Carano (Deadpool). She didn’t exactly impress me but I’ll admit I dropped much of my skepticism. I’m interested in a Wonder Woman movie, especially if, as reported, the majority is set during World War I. There is a definite thrill of seeing the character in action for the first time, even if she’s bathed in Snyder’s desaturated color-corrected palate of gloom. Realistically, Wonder Woman is here to introduce her franchise, to setup the Justice League movies, and as a tether to the other meta-humans who each have a solo film project on the calendar for the next four years. Wonder Woman gets to play coy and mysterious and then extremely capable and fierce during the finale. One of the movie’s biggest moments of enjoyment for me was when Wonder Woman takes a punch and her response is to smile. I look forward to seeing more of her in action and I hope the good vibes I have with the character, and Gadot, carry onward.
The last act of this movie is Snyder pummeling the audience into submission, and it’s here where I just gave up and waited for the cinematic torment to cease. The action up to this point had been rather mediocre, save for that one Batman fight, and I think with each additional movie I’m coming to the conclusion that Snyder is a first-class visual stylist but a terrible action director. The story has lacked greater psychological insights or well-rounded characters, so it’s no surprise that the final act is meant to be the gladiatorial combat Lex has hyped, the epic showdown between gods. In essence, superheroes have taken a mythic property in our pop-culture, and Batman and Superman are our modern Mt. Olympus stalwarts. This showdown should be everything. The operatic heaviness of the battle at least matches with the overwrought tone of the entire movie. It’s too bad then that the titular bout between Batman and Superman lasts a whole ten minutes long. That’s it, folks, because then they have to forget their differences to tackle a larger enemy, the exact outcome that every single human being on the planet anticipated. I’m not even upset that the film ends in this direction, as it was fated. What I am upset about is a climax that feels less than satisfyingly climactic and more like punishment, as well as a conclusion that no single human being on the planet will believe. Snyder’s visual style can be an assault on the senses but what it really does is break you down. The end fight is an incoherent visual mess with the screen often a Where’s Waldo? pastiche of electricity, debris, smoke, fire, explosions, and an assortment of other elements. It’s a thick soup of CGI muck that pays no mind to geography or pacing. It’s like Michael Bay got drunk on Michael Bay-filmmaking. What the hell is the point of filming this movie in IMAX when the visual sequences are either too hard to decipher or something unworthy of the IMAX treatment? Do we need an entire close-up of a shell hitting the ground in glorious IMAX? The Doomsday character looks like a big grey baby before he grows his spikes. I was shocked at how bad the special effects looked for a movie that cost this much money, as if ILM or WETA said, “Good enough.” Once it was all over, I sat and reflected and I think even Snyder’s Sucker Punch had better action.
Another problem is that there are just way too many moments that don’t belong in a 150-minute movie. There’s an entire contrivance of Lois disposing of a valuable tool and then having to go back and retrieve it that made me roll my eyes furiously. It’s an inept way of keeping Lois involved in the action. How does Lois even know the relevancy of this weapon against its new enemy? Then there’s her rescue, which means that even when the movie shoehorns Lois into the action to make her relevant, she still manages to become a damsel in needing of saving. She feels shoehorned in general with the screenplay, zipping from location to location really as a means of uncovering exposition. Then there’s the fact that there is a staggering THREE superfluous dream sequences, and we actually get a flashback to one of those dumb dream sequences. The most extended dream sequence is a nightmarish apocalyptic world where Batman rebels against a world overrun by Superman and his thugs. There’s a strange warning that comes with this extended sequence of future action but it doesn’t involve this movie. Batman vs. Superman suffers from the same sense of over-extension that plagued Age of Ultron. It’s trying to set up so many more movies and potential franchises that it gets lost trying to simply make a good movie rather than Step One in a ten-step film release. In the age of super franchises that are intertwined with super monetary investments, these pilot movies feel more like delivery systems than rewarding storytelling. Payoffs are sacrificed for the promise of future payoffs, and frankly DC hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt here.
I must return to my central, headline-grabbing statement and explain how Batman vs. Superman is a worse movie than the infamous Batman and Robin. I understand how loaded that declaration is so allow me to unpack it. This is a bad movie, and with that I have no doubt. It’s plodding, incoherent, tiresome, dreary, poorly developed, and so self-serious and overwrought to the point that every ounce of fun is relinquished. It feels more like punishment than entertainment, a joyless 150-minute exercise in product launching. By the end of the movie I sat in my chair, defeated and weary. Here is the most insidious part. Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice obliterates any hope I had for the larger DC universe, let alone building anything on par with what Marvel has put together. If this is the direction they’re going, the style, the tone, then I don’t see how any of these will work. What’s to like here? “Fun” is not a dirty word. Fun does not mean insubstantial nor does it mean that larger pathos is mitigated. If you’re going to have a movie about Batman and Superman duking it out, it better damn well be entertaining, and yes fun. It’s not a Lars von Trier movie. The Marvel movies are knocked for not being serious, but they take their worlds and characters seriously enough. They don’t need to treat everything like a funeral dirge, which is what Batman vs. Superman feels like (it even opens and closes on funerals). This movie confirms all the worst impulses that Man of Steel began, and because it gutted all hope I have for the future of these oncoming superhero flicks, I can’t help but lower its final grade. Batman and Robin almost killed its franchise but it was in decline at the time. As campy and innocuous as it was, Batman vs. Superman goes all the way in the other direction to the extreme, leaving a lumbering movie that consumes your hopes. The novelty of the premise and seeing its famous characters standing side-by-side will be enough for some audience members. For everyone else, commence mourning.
Nate’s Grade: D
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Triple 9 (2016)
Sometimes the most upsetting movies are the ones that have a glimmer of promise and then never take advantage of that promise, instead falling upon staid genre clichés and predictable plotting that makes you wonder how a good idea was smashed into a boring and formulaic product. Triple 9 falls into this category of film disappointment. It has a great premise: a group of corrupt cops (Chiwetel Ejiofer, Anthony Mackie) are in debt to an Israeli mob matriarch (Kate Winslet) and owe her one last score, and their solution to ensure they can get away with their crime is to arrange for a new cop on the beat (Casey Affleck) to be killed, thus providing a major distraction. The problem here is that none of these characters are at all interesting. They all have conflicts and the movie does a fine job of providing each one with some kind of pressure and general motivation, but outside of the forces against them, you can summarize them in a scant few words apiece (drug addict, war vet, single dad, etc.). The plot events also just seem to coast around until a pile-up of climaxes, all of which lack satisfying closure as the body count mounts. It’s hard to care, and the only character that seems worth following is Affleck’s newcomer sniffing out the dangers that are closing in on him. Woody Harrelson feels like he’s making a special guest appearance from a separate movie from Oren Moverman as a drug-addled and angry detective. Too often the characters feel out of orbit from one another, the storylines rarely coalescing. It feels like everyone was given the same acting note of being dour and harried. Winslet’s hammy turn as an Israeli mob boss allows her to reuse her accent from Steve Jobs. Director John Hillcoat (Lawless) provides a certain charge with how he stages the robbery sequences but it’s not enough. Triple 9 is a movie that wastes a great cast, a fine premise, and a talented director. It’s not terrible by most accounts but it’s resoundingly mediocre, and sometimes that can be even worse than bad.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Fast and Furious 6 (2013)
I’ll confess something upfront: I have no interest in cars whatsoever. Never have. I don’t care. Seeing sexy cars with their gleaming and purring engines, well it does nothing for me. Hearing people talk about American vs. import or different engine capabilities, well it puts me to sleep. I get no thrill from cars alone. What I do get thrills from are when the cars are utilized in exciting action sequences that are well developed. I enjoy the role the cars play rather than the mechanics of the cars themselves. I’ve never watched a full Fast and Furious movie until the 2009 sequel, the fifth, which added notable franchise-lifter The Rock. I was won over by the wow-factor of director Justin Lin’s bombastic action. This is not a franchise for me from the gearhead content; however, I have become a fan thanks to the talents of Lin, the inclusion of my man crush The Rock, and some truly spectacular action set pieces. Fast and Furious 6, or Furious 6 as the onscreen title declares, is pretty much everything I thought it would be: dumb, loud, physics-free, and boasting remarkable action sequences, and it delivers.
It’s years after Dom (Vin Diesel) and Brian (Paul Walker) and their crew pulled off their epic heist in Rio. Hobbs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) recruits Dom’s team for help nabbing a really bad guy with his own really bad team. Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) is a military-trained Brit who is hijacking advanced weapon parts to put together a super weapon that can knock out the power grid for a country. Dom’s ready to turn down the offer, content to live it up in paradise, when Hobbs shares a photo of Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), alive and well, and part of Shaw’s wrecking crew. Letty, Dom’s old squeeze, was thought dead, but it turns out she has amnesia, and Dom is determined to foil the bad guy and reclaim his girlfriend.
When I say Fast and the Furious 6 is a ridiculous movie in the extreme, I mean that as a compliment and a detriment. The movie never attempts to be anything outside of a loony, high-octane action thriller that gleefully ignores reality. Characters will fly off cars at great speeds, crashing into parked motor vehicles as “safe landings.” Brian will get himself thrown in the same prison as a notorious criminal, gather his needed intel, and escape all within a couple of days. The bad guy’s plan is also one of those only-in-the-movies super weapons. For goodness sake there’s even the hoariest of plot devices – amnesia. Really, Letty can’t remember anything. How prevalent is amnesia? Movies make it seem like it’s one Flintstones-style bump on the head away. Then there’s the massive amounts of wear and tear the heroes take on, their cars take on, and in general their superhuman status. But anyone expecting these films to adhere to a recognizable reality, especially after five movies, is adrift. Part of the appeal of the franchise is exactly its over-the-top lunacy with its action.
Having only really checked into the franchise one movie prior, I’m sure that there are plenty of moviegoers who are wrapped up in the ongoing saga of Dom and Brian and their motorin’ crew. I didn’t care about the characters; well, I generally liked most of them in an abstract way, but I was never that involved with them. I enjoyed The Rock’s character the most but that is also due to the innate magnetism of The Rock, someone Diesel could take some serious notes from. I say all this because there is a lot of time spent on the ongoing character relationships between Dom and his amnesiac love, Letty. He’s trying to pull her back, reminding her of the memories he thinks are tucked away, and they talk and drive and talk and I was bored. Perhaps if I had four movies worth of investment I would care more, but I don’t. Then again, we’re talking about a romance between Diesel and Rodriguez, both fine genetic specimens, but neither of them are what you would call gifted thespians outside of their defacto tough guy roles. The rest of Dom’s team are given throwaway bits, though even with those meager offerings Tyrese Gibson (Transformers) comes close to wearing out his welcome as a nagging naysayer. The multiracial cast is so large that it makes it hard for any of them to actually develop as characters. Plus, this movie provides a matching evil cast that doubles the number of characters.
Ignoring all the dumb plot points and repetitious messages, when it comes time to unleash some top-draw action, that’s when Lin earns his mettle. The man has guided the franchise through four sequels ever since 2006’s Tokyo Drift, which dovetails with the timeline of this film in a surprising way (did you know these were prequels and not sequels?). I can forgive all the lapses in logic and physics when I get action sequences so good I don’t want to blink. The last two extended action set pieces in Fast and Furious 6 are stunners, massive, constantly evolving, and ridiculous in the best ways possible. The first is a freeway chase involving a tank and along a coastal Spanish highway high above cliffs. The phrase “freeway chase involving a tank” should immediately put a smile to your face. There is such over-the-top vehicular carnage, all along a trepidatious path, and the pacing just keeps things fully amped. The finale involves a giant military aircraft and a seemingly endless runway (seriously, this thing has to be like 80 miles long). Dom and his team are driving cars inside the plane, out of it, zipping around, snagging wings, being carried off with the plane; it’s a glorious sequence that involves multiple points of action, different team members, and develops organically while still escalating the awesome. Lin handles these sequences like a pro. I’m tempted to say that the greatness of these concluding action set pieces is reason enough to see Fast and Furious 6 in the theater on the big screen.
I’ve never really understood the appeal of Diesel (Babylon A.D.). I felt like I was asleep when it was decided that he had become a major action star. I don’t get it. The man grumbles just about every line of dialogue into an almost indecipherable growl. He also has the habit of getting very quiet when he’s supposed to be serious, thus making it even harder to understand what the guy is saying. I know at this point Diesel is a package deal with the franchise, but I wouldn’t mind if the far more charismatic Johnson (Pain and Gain) were to slide over and replace him as lead. Rodriguez (Battle: Los Angeles) seems to have a habit of dying in franchises and being resurrected (see: TV’s Lost, Resident Evil 5). The rest of the franchise players do their parts well enough with what little they have. Evans (Immortals) makes for a suitable sneering if forgettable villain. My favorite new actor is Gina Carano (Haywire), not necessarily because she’s a great actress, though she’s better than you’d think for an MMA-fighter-turned-actor, but because this woman is a born movie star. She’s got screen presence, a fierce look, and the lady does her own stunts. She is an impressive beast of an action star and hopefully somebody will get her the right project to make her break out big time (Haywire wasn’t it, folks).
While I prefer Fast Five, a more fun flick where the team play their parts in a convoluted but entertaining heist, Fast and Furious 6 is a highly enjoyable summer movie with some top-class action sequences. This franchise is the epitome of the popcorn thriller, its vaunting heights of ridiculousness also its most laudable quality. Six movies in, I imagine most moviegoers know what they’re getting with this franchise and they must like it because every sequel seems to outperform the last at the box-office. The formula of fast cars, sexy ladies, and hyperactive action make for a surefire, turn-off-your-brain summer spectacle. Lin has a real knack for directing large-scale destruction that’s easy to follow and easy to get caught up in. He has a strong tentpole mentality and I imagine he will be tapped to helm some other big-budget action picture. Whatever it is, his involvement guarantees my interest. I don’t know about Fast and Furious 7, scheduled to come out speedily next summer. Lin is being replaced by James Wan of horror fame, notably Saw and Insidious (his DePalma-esque work on 2007’s Death Sentence was actually striking). Considering Lin made one feature before jumping into Furious mode, a small indie crime drama, I won’t discount Wan’s potential, but I’ll miss Lin all the same. In the end, the director could be just as interchangeable as any other part of this franchise as long as it sticks to its tested formula and delivers the goods when it comes to ridiculous action.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Knight & Day (2010)
Imagine a James Bond movie from the point of view of the Bond girl. That’s the premise for the curiously titled Knight and Day, a mostly breezy action movie that really resembles a romantic comedy with guns. It works thanks to the chemistry between Cameron Diaz (Bond girl) and Tom Cruise (super agent). She’s engulfed in a sketchy international spy caper that is replete with typical stock characters (sleazy agents, kooky scientists, angry authority figures). The movie, under the direction of James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma), tried too hard to be lighthearted and can veer from confidant to indifferent. The film is told from Diaz’s point of view, which means there are chunks of the movie where the action occurs off screen, which will naturally disappoint people. There’s one montage where Diaz has been drugged and she keeps going in and out, waking up to a different dangerous situation. It’s meant to be satiric but it might also frustrate. The action sequences, on whole, are well paced and make use of their exotic locales. Knight and Day doesn’t fully work due to its leaps in tone from satire to sincere romance, the on/off switch for the law of physics, and introducing a secondary antagonist far too late in the film. Cruise lays out a full-on charm offensive. You’re reminded that this man is a movie star, and Cruise has fun tweaking that image as well as the public perception over his mental state. His character may be crazy after all, but Cruise is having serious fun and you might too watching the man with the million-dollar smile.
Nate’s Grade: B
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