Holy mixed-bag! Batman v Superman

The bigger they come the harder they fall ... and this one’s pretty big.

After months of speculation and, in some cases, frothing at the mouth, Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has finally hit cinemas. But whether it’s worth going to see depends, to a degree, on how you view the director.

Snyder first made a splash with the release of 300 (2006), the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s 1998 limited-run comic-book series. In doing so, he quickly established a niche for himself as the go-to man for intensely muscular action films packed with highly stylised imagery and over-the-top visual effects.

While Snyder has some undeniable strengths in his bag of tricks, irony and subtlety are not among them. Batman v Superman is a huge, bombastic, monster of a movie, a Frankenstein’s Monster in fact, built from a fragmented and sometimes confusing pile of disparate parts.

Batman v Superman was of course conceived as a sequel to Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013), which delivered a new take on the Superman origin story. But it is no oversight that top billing for the sequel goes to Ben Affleck’s Batman.

The casting of Affleck was widely disparaged by internet fanboys still mourning the recent loss of Christian Bale’s incarnation of the Dark Knight. But Affleck is an inspired choice – a mature, experienced and pessimistic Batman who, in the words of his long-suffering butler and enabler Alfred Pennyworth (Jeremy Irons), has “lived too long to die young”.

In his few scant minutes on screen Irons delivers by far the most engaging performance in the entire bloated 151 minutes. Where the rest of the movie is unrelentingly dour and serious, Irons manages to imbue his prickly Alfred with charm and much appreciated moments of humour.

The Affleck/Irons double act is the highlight of the film and bodes well for the upcoming Batman reboot in which Affleck will both direct and star. Affleck has evolved from an adequate leading man into a fine director, as evidenced by his trio of features: Gone Baby Gone (2007), The Town (2010) and Argo (2012).

Henry Cavill continues to provide audiences with a serviceable Superman, though his Clark Kent is simply not in the same league as the late, great Christopher Reeves. In his day, Reeves provided two genuinely different characterisations that played up the duality of the role to great effect; Cavill is always serious and brooding with his brow deeply furrowed in exactly the same way, regardless of which version of the character he is supposed to be inhabiting.

Gal Gadot spends most of her screen time in elegant evening wear as Diana Prince, Wonder Woman’s alter ego. When she does finally appear in full regalia as the Amazonian warrior princess she is required to do very little other than pose dramatically, the most physical aspects of the character’s action scenes are handled by a CGI double. Gadot certainly has the exotic looks and accent required to play Diana, but it must be said she is not a physically imposing figure.

In this day and age where real life fighters such as Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano have been ably demonstrating that women can indeed be just as physically tough and dangerous as any man, it seems anachronistic to cast a slightly built model/actress as the greatest female warrior in the DC universe.

Jesse Eisenberg’s performance as antagonist Lex Luthor seems to be lifted from another film entirely. The manic edge he gives to the billionaire brat is out of place among the rest of the grimly restrained cast.

Perhaps this might have worked had there been any sense at all of some kind of character motivation, but it seems that this Lex is bad simply because he is Lex Luthor. Check out the first two or three seasons of television’s Smallville (2001-2011) for a much more satisfying take on the Luthor character – a deeply flawed but also highly relatable young man whose many bad choices are always understandable.

The usual Hollywood formula claims a movie needs to make 2.5 times its cost at the box office to be considered a success. Typically just under 50% of actual ticket prices get returned to studios, so if the rumoured US$410 million price tag of Batman v Superman is correct, then it will need to generate at least US$1 billion in ticket sales. Anything less than US$820 million and the movie is technically making a loss.

This seems like a high-risk strategy for Warner Brothers, who have produced what by most standards could objectively be described as a “bad” movie.

That said, we live in a brave new world where international box office is often more important than US domestic revenue. Many of the international markets where Hollywood action films play have little understanding or interest in subtleties of character and traditional Hollywood storytelling.

If you like Snyder’s work you’ll find something to appreciate here; if you’re not a fan then I think you’ll see potential for other filmmakers to take the set-up and run in new directions.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was released in Australia on March 24.

Banner image: Roadshow Films.