Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice

Bat-tered and bruised

- James White

Bruce Wayne. Clark Kent. Diana Prince. Properly together on the big screen in live-action for the first time ever. Surely you can’t mess that up? And yet Zack Snyder, so consumed with the grim and serious tone he set in Man Of Steel, gives it a royal try, sucking the fun out of a landmark cinematic event.

But let’s find the positives, shall we? Ben Affleck makes for a decent, haunted Bruce, enlivened by his spiky interplay with Jeremy Irons’s Alfred and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman. Gadot’s warrior is a ray of light, grinning into battle with the inevitable CG baddie, while the final confrontation – when it actually gives the actors something to do rather than their stuntmen – has a few flashes of the sort of movie we might one day get. That’s about it for the plus column.