Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Our Review

The movie that broke the fanbase in half. Batman v Superman wants to be a meditation on power, fear, and godhood, and about half of it is genuinely fascinating: Ben Affleck’s older, crueler Batman is one of the best screen takes on the character ever, and the warehouse fight in the final act is the finest Batman action ever put on film. Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman crashes in with a theme song that steals the entire movie in five minutes.

So what goes wrong? Jesse Eisenberg plays Lex Luthor as a twitchy tech billionaire caricature, and every scene with him grates. The story lurches from subplot to subplot, dream sequences interrupt the flow to tease future movies, and the climactic resolution of the whole feud hinges on a shared mother’s name, a turn famously unearned. The Ultimate Edition fixes maybe twenty percent of this with restored connective tissue, and it is the only version worth watching.

As released in theaters, this is a gorgeous, humorless, overstuffed mess with three great performances buried inside it. Our score: 5/10. Watch the Ultimate cut, skip the theatrical one, and mourn what a tighter edit could have been.