Batman v Superman by Terrio and Goyer

This movie was not as bad as I expected — I really didn't like Zack Snyder's previous Superman movie. No effort was made to get the audience to care for the characters and consequently all the fight scenes and special effects just left me cold.

But, as I say, this new effort is not as bad as I expected, and not bad in the same way I expected... but still pretty terrible. Shall we go through the headline mistakes?

Like so many movies of this ilk, it begins with a big action sequence which means nothing because we don’t care about the characters yet. I am developing a maxim for film writing: a car chase is only interesting if we care about the characters in the cars. 

Well, that's not the case here. So much so that there is a car chase during which I actually fell asleep.

Where was I? Oh yes, the other things wrong with this movie: the bullet of a mystery design which is shot into Lois Lane’s notebook, and which is a major plot point, doesn’t look like a bullet. Everybody in the audience (or at least I) thought it was another one of those little tracking devices which we just saw in the earlier scene. 

I must concede that the cast is excellent. Indeed Jeremy Irons as Alfred is far and away the best thing on the screen during the endless two and a half hours of this movie. Jesse Eisenberg’s version of Lex Luthor is a lot fun, until it begins to grate... Plus, I could have done without the revelation that he's an abused child. Oh well, that's you off the hook, then, Lex. 

But what is really unforgivable is that the "end of level" monster  (i.e. the one at the movie's big climax) is truly, unbelievably crap. I really mean I couldn’t believe it — I was absolutely sure it must metamorphose into something more interesting. But it didn’t. Guys, since H.R, Geiger created the Alien in 1979, this kind of crap is no longer acceptable.

Also, making your big shock ending the death of Superman is stupid beyond belief. Because literally nobody is going to buy the notion that he’s really dead. So there goes your ending. 

Oh, and Gal Gadot, who was supremely wonderful in Criminal, is wasted here as Wonder Woman. 

(Image credits: No shortage of posters at Imp Awards.)