I thought the movie was OK for what it was and was only spared in my eyes by the performances of the two main characters.

 

The Good: Affleck and Cavill nailed their characters. It continues to stun me how people keep sleeping on Henry Cavill. He did a good job in Man of Steel (it's not his fault Superman was written so sullen and taciturn...blame the New 52 incarnation of Superman for that nonsense) and an even better one in BvS. Affleck isn't too surprising honestly. He's a huge fan and as a result, was probably the best person they could have gotten to play this version of Batman (older and more jaded).

 

The Bad: I'm a dissenting voice here but Wonder Woman's entire placement outside of the end of the movie was bad. Did the writers get confused and mistake Wonder Woman for the Black Widow? Diana is fierce, powerful and direct. She is NOT coy, demure and prone to subterfuge and trickery. Gal Gadot looks the part and killed it when she actually WAS Wonder Woman, though. I look forward to her movie (praying it survives this).

 

The Ugly: Eisenberg's Luthor literally ruined the movie for me. Not his fault per se. But that guy we saw on screen was not Lex Luthor. It was a bad impersonation of the Riddler. Lex is not insane. Lex is not easy to manipulate/influence (yes, not even by the person/thing alluded to in BvS) and he isn't ever so crass, direct nor sloppy. NEVER. A movie is only as strong as its antagonist and the antagonists in this one were bad. Both of them were awful.

 

The problem for the masses is too many people are trying to directly compare it to the Avengers. The Justice League isn't full of a bunch of proverbial clowns who like to joke and wisecrack among themselves or with their villains. And the two sources of direct comedy in the League weren't in the movie (much) in Flash (Wally West...NOT Barry Allen) and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan).

 

Simply put, I left the theater thinking that DC tried to make a movie for the fans and not for the masses but the writers tried to jam too much into this movie while not having a firm enough grasp on the nature of specific intergral characters, namely Lex Luthor and Wonder Woman, to pull anything else off other than Batman, Superman and their interactions.


The final conflict was one of the most ham-fisted things I've seen in a movie in a long time. It was cool in the sense that you finally got to see Wonder Woman actually being Wonder Woman but that aside...way to make a guy a jobber. I didn't even like that particular character in the comics, but he most assuredly is not a jobber level adversary.

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