CAPSULE: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016, Dir. Zack Snyder)

I don't often debrief after films. It fucks with my head. I prefer to write clean, with just my ideas bouncing around. My post credits conversations usually amount to - Did you like it? Yes. No. It was okay.

For Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice I went as far as - It is better than the first one.

It is. Or at least my reaction is kinder.

Perhaps my expectations were lower. But I actually enjoyed this effort a whole lot more than Man of Steel,

The thing is, reading back over my review of director Zack Snyder's first outing with Supes (which is longer and more eloquent than anything you are going to get here), I confirmed what was kind of niggling at me throughout Dawn of Justice and which came to the fore in pint-fuelled debrief that I uncharacteristically participated in afterwards - this film is a thematic rehash of the first, just with some mummy issues thrown in.

The fact that David S. Goyer (this time around with Chris Terrio) has elected to pick up just before where Man of Steel left off only serves to compound the issues. They throw Ben Affleck's crime weary Batman onto Metropolis' streets as Superman and Zod are in the middle of their inaugural 9/11 reenactment. Batman experiences the horror of the destruction (we know the feeling) and buys immediately into Goyer's preoccupation with the "gods walk among us" concept. Going along for the ride on that thematic treadmill is Holly Hunter as a dithering U.S. senator and Jesse Eisenberg as a pre-deranged Zuckerberg-esque Lex Luthor.

There's a strange presumption that the audience will buy into all this without any real legwork on the part of the screenplay. The first hour of Dawn of Justice chops from Batman to flashback to Superman to dream sequence to Lex to expository news reports, and never do Goyer or Terrio see fit to give any grounding. You've all seen the first film, right?

Snyder even grafts in a scene from Man of Steel in its entirety as if he realised to late that the material he has to hand lacks sufficient motivation.

Once more, fan service trumps cohesion. There's more interest in seeing Batman and Superman fight than there is in providing any believable reason for it to actually happen. And even when it does, the film has an even more unbelievable climactic sequence so obviously stuffed in its pants that it is difficult to buy into the rivalry when you know its impending outcome.

This would be easy to take if Dawn of Justice had the smarts to scaffold its action. Unfortunately, as before, Snyder lacks the human touch, which severely undercuts his attempts to examine the interplay of humanity and our god complex. The message here is as garbled as the narrative construction and eventually gets lost in the bombast.

So amongst all this, how did I find the energy to enjoy Dawn of Justice? Perhaps the flashes of potential. Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman is a spine tingler. I found her presence electrifying, worthy even of Hans Zimmer's orchestral assault (though her leitmotif is a little too reminiscent of a Cirque du Soleil backing track). Even before she whips out the cuffs and lasso, she tears up the screen with a pseudo-espionage chic that adds more class than the film probably deserves.

On top of this, the clearest of the action sequences are thrilling too. Batman's one man assault on Drazic and his cronies places him up there with Bale on the action front and I was more than satisfied with Affleck's performance throughout, even if his overall look could have done with a little more grizzle.

And Henry Cavill takes his shirt off.

I closed off last time around decrying the fact that there weren't going to be too many kiddies around the world wanting to idolise Superman or what he stands for. There's not much more they'll be able to grab onto here but the DCU (as it is clearly being positioned) promises something to look forward to. They'll just have to grow into it.

★★★☆

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