Pun Salad

I had a day off, so boogied on over to Newington to catch a late morning/early afternoon screening before it vanishes from theatres. I think there were five other people in the auditorium.

I read all the vitriol directed at this movie, but wound up liking it anyway.

Most of the plot is right up there in the title. Batman/Bruce Wayne has gone a little bit around the bend in his pursuit of evildoers, and he's more than a little irked at how the Superman/Zod battle from the previous movie trashed Metropolis and left thousands of collateral-damage casualties. Superman, for his part, is unfond of Batman's increasingly violent vigilantism.

Add Lex Luthor to the mix, who's eager to encourage the mutual irritation of our heroes into a deadly duel. And Lois Lane, always in peril. And—you probably already have heard—a reclusive female superhero, famous for her Lasso of Truth, Bracelets of Submission, and Bazongas of Awesomeness.

It's fun, but honestly, it's also way long, and I invited disaster by not timing my restroom visits better. And, geez, the plot is mystifying: just what is Luthor trying to accomplish here? At least the Gene Hackman version from 1978 (!) had a clear, if ludicrous, goal in mind. And our superbabe: exactly why is she doing what she's doing at the beginning? If any of this was explained, I missed it.

Also it's kind of pretentious: someone should tell the scriptwriters that's it's pointless for us mere mortals to draw coherent moral lessons from the travails of superheroes. Don't bother!

Along with the pretentiousness comes humorlessness. Although Jeremy Irons as Alfred delivers some good acerbic lines, the funny banter between B & S ("I thought she was with you.") comes as kind of a shock when it finally arrives.