VULTURE: It’s a shame that ‘Batman v Superman’ is also a storytelling disgrace. It has maybe six opening scenes and jumps so incessantly from subplot to subplot that a script doctor would diagnose a peculiarly modern infection: “disjunctivitis.” Said infection is the upshot of a sort of gene-splicing. For a studio to move beyond the “franchise” and “tentpole” stages to the vastly lucrative “universe,” a comic-book movie must at every turn gesture towards sequels and spinoffs, teasing out loose ends, cultivating irresolution. The movie wanders into so many irrelevant byways that it comes to seem abstract. There’s enough going on to keep you watching — and, as I said, to keep fanboys wowed by the scale of the production and pretension. But most people will leave feeling drained and depressed, wondering how a studio can get away with withholding so much. MORE
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I get that this mano a supermano story line is a sacred text among comic-book aficionados, but ‘Dawn of Justice’ doesn’t do the tale any favors. It’s overstuffed, confusing, and seriously crippled by Eisenberg’s over-the-top performance. As the megalomaniac tech mogul hell-bent on bringing our heroes to their knees, the actor is a grating cartoon of manic motormouth tics. He might as well be wearing a buzzing neon sign around his neck that says “Crazy Villain.” MORE
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: The solemn, grandiose atmosphere is severely disrupted by Luthor, portrayed by Eisenberg as a privileged tech guru who makes the actor’s take on Mark Zuckerberg look like the epitome of style and manners. Loaded with vocal ticks and gushing with smarmy ripostes and threats, the character is loathsome without an ounce of insidious charm; if the legacy of the studio’s ‘Dark Knight’ films might have suggested anything, it should have been in the area of great villains, but here there is just a great vacuum. MORE
DEADSPIN: A clearly excited 7- or 8-year-old kid sitting in front of me busted out crying and had to be whisked out of the theater by his father within the first five minutes. Perhaps he was unnerved by the harsh, operatic violence of Bruce Wayne’s parents getting murdered…or maybe he was offended by the notion that a 2016 Batman movie felt it necessary to depict Bruce Wayne’s parents getting murdered. Either way, this kid bounced. (As an unsubtle metaphor for the aging target audience for comic-book movies, this is nonetheless way subtler than anything in the film itself.) I felt really terrible for that kid immediately, and was mildly envious of him two hours and 25 minutes later. MORE
DAILY BEAST: It’s a trying and utterly deflating thing to spend hours watching two well-intentioned heroes fighting for no reason at all. The hollowness of Batman and Superman’s actual beef effectively neuters everything that’s interesting about juxtaposing these two heroes: Vigilante human v. godlike messiah, cool guy loner dude v. goofy four-eyes, confirmed bachelor v. dopey monogamist. The action veers from explosion-filled car chases on slicked down Gotham streets to bruising brawls in abandoned buildings, but any promise of deeper meaning dissolves the minute Batman and Superman start trading blows. MORE
VARIETY: Juggling all of these strands while steadily beating the drum toward the battle promised in the title, Snyder sometimes loses track of his various allegories. Scripters Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer provide kernels of philosophical and theological quandaries throughout, while their nods toward contemporary political debates are more complex than the scattered visual gags (such as an anti-Superman protester waving an “Aliens Are Un-American” placard) might seem to imply. Yet the essential clash of ideologies promised by the central conflict — vigilante justice vs. self-sacrificing restraint, night vs. day, Dionysus vs. Apollo — never develops quite as forcefully as it should, and the life-or-death battle between the two icons ultimately comes down to a series of misunderstandings. MORE