Batman v Superman Is Pretty—and Pretty Dumb

Everyone loves Batman and Superman, just apparently not when they’re trying to rip each other’s heads off. While audiences give Batman v Superman a 74% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, critics are hovering at the 30% mark, calling the film, well, a disaster. Here's what they're saying:

• "The film might be pretty to look at"—some scenes even come "close to high art"—but it's "a shambolic, ill-advised, white-hot mess of a movie," writes Barry Hertz in a 1.5-star review at the Globe and Mail. "There are so many baffling elements to BvS that singling out any one is to be paralyzed by choice." One example: Director Zack Snyder's "complete mishandling" of Superman as "kind of a jerk," Hertz says. Snyder also "diminishes every female character."
• "This is what happens when you give a bad director a quarter-billion or so dollars," writes Chris Klimek at NPR. He calls the film a "ponderous, smothering, over-pixelated zeppelin crash of a movie" that is "confusing before it gets boring, and boring before it gets bruising." About 23% of the film he liked. The rest, not so much.

• Andrew O'Hehir is a bit more forgiving, saying he was mostly entertained for all 151 minutes. "Snyder's OCD-level attention to the visual details," Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Lex Luthor, and Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman, "who brings in a badly needed dose of Dragon Tattoo-style female energy," rescue the film from being awful, he writes at Salon. Yet the film "is kind of dopey and plays out some laborious plot twists in the DC narrative at unnecessary length."
• Matthew Lickona at the San Diego Reader keeps his review short and not-so-sweet. The flick is "in a word, exhausting. In a few more, overblown, overstuffed, repetitive, bombastic, and sometimes just dumb. (Never mind dreary to look at and punishing to hear.)" Too bad there's "a bunch of sequel-bait," to boot.

(But Ben Affleck says the movie is for fans, not critics.)