Film Review –
Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice -3D
With great
expectations come great disappointments...i dunno who said that and I am
guessing its not Tobey Maguire from the first spider-man movie but it aptly
fits the film I am going to be reviewing this week. Batman Vs Superman – Dawn
of Justice has been in the works for almost a couple of years and has aroused
great expectations from all film aficionado's. And not only because of the
interesting premise- the clash between two do-gooders, two superheros, but also
because of the interesting cast choice- Ben Affleck as the batman. Now there
were a lot of detractors who prophesied that casting an over the hill actor
like Affleck in a role requiring a macho action star was going to have a
disappointing end and they have been proved right. Ben affleck does indeed look
completely out of place as the suave Bruce Wayne but considering the storyline features a washed out version of batman who has been fighting crime-
unsuccessful at that- for twenty years, Ben Affleck with his negligible screen
presence fits the role of an afterthought superhero. Unfortunately he gets more
screen time than the more popular superman character played by Henry Cavil.
Which contributes a lot to the overall disappointment of the film.
The storyline is simple – batman feels superman is reckless and is not worried about
collateral damage to the hundreds of civilians (dead civilians) who get caught
in between when superman is fighting super-villains. On the other side of the
equation superman is worried that batman is a lone vigilante who doesn't care
about law or justice and simply hunts down criminals as a vendetta. So superman
wants to bring batman to justice while batman simply wants to kill off superman
to remove any alien threat to the planet. And just when you think the movie gets
interesting and the two heroes face off for a showdown the plot borrows from countless Indian movies which
utilize the “mother sentiment” to have a dramatic turning point.
In this
instance it is a dying superman who is critically weakened by batman's
kryptonite bullets shouting his mother's name- Martha, which coincidentally is
also batman's dead mother's name, which means ultimately that batman doesn't
kill him but embraces him as brother. At least they stopped with that. Any
more clichéd and they could have released it as a straight Tamil movie.
Superman's girlfriend Lois Lane who is a reporter discovers that the whole
showdown was orchestrated by Jesse Eisenberg who plays a young Lex Luthor and
the two superheros join hands to find Luther who has by now found himself a
convenient super-beast made from alien DNA. The climax involves a motley group
of beaten down metahumans like superman and the wonder woman joined by a lone
normal human batman in battling the
creature. Ultimately superman makes the supreme sacrifice of killing the
creature with a kryptonian weapon and in the process killing himself off.
Director
Zack Snyder who made the eminently watchable 300 has badly erred in making the
farce of a superhero movie which cannot hold the audience's interest beyond the first few minutes. An interesting plot goes haywire in execution.
Verdict-
watch for the TV premiere.
