Welcome to another edition of Movie Review Monday!

This week's film is the recently released Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, starring Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, Jesse Eisenburg, Gal Gadot, and strong (and large) supporting cast.

I talked about some of my initial impressions of this movie in my geek out last week, and I just wanted to go a bit more in depth with my thoughts here with this highly contentious movie. The critics have not been kind to this one, and many comic book purists are having issue with it as well. I will say that I think it is not as bad as some people are making it out to be, but it is not a great movie by any means. It is confusing, unfocused, and needlessly boring for the subject matter. While I don't need a MCU clone, I would have hoped for a more fun movie.

To balance things out, there were some things I enjoyed about the movie, and it seems are pretty universally appreciated. Ben Affleck did well as both Bruce Wayne and Batman where other actors seemed to do well as one or the other. He portrayal was his own and he succeeded where many thought he would fail. Gal Gadot makes the most of her (very) limited screen time as Wonder Woman, especially in the final fight sequence. I will admit to getting chills when she hit the screen and her music kicked in. It was really well done and I look forward to what is to come in her solo movie next year. Jesse Eisenburg did pretty well as the manic, eccentric, egotistical manipulative, genius Lex Luthor. While some of the confusion comes from his character's motivations, some of the plot holes could just be explained away by his paranoia and/or hubris.

While I appreciate the attempts of this movie to play catch up to the MCU, I felt like the nods to other Justice League members to be underwhelming and sort of forced. It leaves me wondering how it will all work in a bit of a bad way, but we are getting Justice League, Part 1 next year so maybe it will all be a bit of rush job. Looking back it was nice to have a movie to get to know each of the members of the Avengers before bringing them together. Part of what holds Dawn of Justice back is that we don't get to know Wonder Woman or Batman as well as we could have to have their big team-up really resonate. Wonder Woman will at least get her own movie before Justice League, but other than Superman with Man of Steel, she is the only one.

Dawn of Justice is a movie that has a lot riding on it. I would liken it to Amazing Spider-Man 2 in how it must have been viewed by the production people. They both wanted so bad to set up their own movie universes, that, especially with Spider-Man, they suffer under their own weight. We can see where Dawn of Justice falters with that weight at times, but it holds steady, despite many issues (like the ending, was not a fan! And all the dream sequences?!).

I am very curious to hear other people's thoughts, so leave them in the comments below.

You can check out Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice at a theater near you!

Thanks for stopping by!