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Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins (2000)
Simple, great fun
This is, of course, the big prequel direct-to-dvd movie setting up for the show. Often these projects can go awry and end up flat and lame, like with Return of Jafar or the failed Beauty and the Beast or Atlantis pilot movies.
However, in this case, Pixar and Disney managed to pull it off shockingly, spectacularly well. The animation is well above your typical 90s-era Saturday Morning TV budget look, with great dynamic, fluid movements for all the characters, wonderful expressions and surprisingly great action sequences.
The characters are pretty broad; the bold hero Buzz, the strong female lead Princess Mira Nova, the comic relief 'funny guy' XR, and the bumbling but well-meaning Booster, etc.
What sets them apart is the voice actors. Of course, Tim Allen was brought in to dub over Patrick Warburton's unique line reads, and he did it magnificently. If anything, I much prefer Allen's takes than Warburton's in this case. We've also got stellar talents like Larry Miller, Steven Furst, Nicole Sullivan and the crown jewel of the whole cast, Wayne Knight as Zurg.
Combine that with fun dialogue, a silly but simple and easy-to-follow plot, and some hilarious exchanges between the characters, and you've got a really fun movie for kids of any age, 3-99yrs.
8 stars, one of my childhood favourites I still revisit.
Transformers (1984)
Don't let nostalgia blind you
This is not a good show.
If anyone tells you this show was good, they're either lying to you, lying to themselves, or wearing the biggest, thickest, utterly blinding, rose-coloured nostalgia goggles of all time.
This was never a good show. Maybe when you were 8 years old and had no idea what quality was, you could enjoy it. Maybe in the 80s when cartoons were entirely dominated by cheap, soulless cash grabs which talked down to their audience, actively trying to kill your brain cells so they could sell merchandise, lacking any real effort, this one stood out as better.
But today, stacked up against all the shows which came out since, this show looks like trash. Its animation is sub par to be kind, its voice acting ranges from "okay" to terrible, the pacing is wrong in every scene... I'd have a hard time mentioning anything that went right here.
I watched this as a kid in the 2000s, growing up with Avatar: The Last Airbender, Batman the Animated Series and other great shows which hold up today. Many series' I grew up with are just as good, or even better looking at them as an adult. This is not one of those shows.
As a kid, people kept telling me how amazing the 80s Transformers was, got me all hyped to get it on DVD, and when it finally arrived one Christmas wjen I was 10 years old, I watched it.... and it was a massive disappointment.
I've revisited it a few times to see if I can find any quality whatsoever, and with the exception of a few moments in season 1-2, or some episodes in season 3, this show plain sucks.
Don't let nostalgia blind you. Take those nostalgia goggles off and really look at it. This show does not deserve an 8 star rating. It's 5 at best, and that's being extremely generous.
Batman: Soul of the Dragon (2021)
Depressingly Mediocre
I really was excited to see this on the shelves. DC is capable of great animated films, such as Under the Red Hood, Gotham by Gaslight or the sublime Assault on Arkham -- and that's ONLY counting Batman titles.
This, though, just is so boring and lacking something. I don't know what's wrong here, but it just feels so small, unimportant and has no identity or hook. I also have absolutely NO idea why this film is set in the 70s. In DC's The New Frontier, its time period and setting is used so they can specifically tackle and comment on events, culture and politics happening during the 1950s and 60s, such as McCarthyism, the war in Vietnam etc. Gotham by Gaslight is a story which couldn't be told any other time than the late 19th Century. Here, though, there is absolutely NO justification for setting this in the 70s.
Its setting also makes some of the dialogue absolutely unbearable, especially with the PAINFUL dialogue for Ben Turner. It's clearly a bunch of ignorant, middle-age white guys trying to write Mr. T-style dialogue. It just hurts to sit through.
This could have been set in the 80s, 90s, 2021 -- it wouldn't matter, because the plot has nothing to do with the 1970s.
The animation is roughly en-parr with a mediocre episode of Justice League from 2004, if slightly better looking in art direction (and I DO mean slightly). Occasionally the fight scenes can reach the level of "OK." Never above that, though -- if you want to watch much better fights and animation, watch the excellent The Dark Knight Returns films.
This is also another in a long line of stories with some great evil which must never be allowed to reach the world... which can be beaten by just hitting it really hard or slicing it with a sword. So really, if this great evil was unleashed, it'd last about 10 seconds before being stopped by regular military in about 10 seconds via bombs, guns etc.
The most obnoxious part of this is, this is not even remotely a Batman film, despite his name being the biggest thing on the box. Hell, BEN TURNER (and I had NO idea who this guy was until they said the name "Bronze Tiger" about an hour in, despite the fact I'm a major comic book reader) has more of a character arc than Batman does, who's barely a bit-player in this movie who just shows up occasionally and has practically no dialogue or personality. I bet if you noted the actual time Bruce Wayne spends on-screen as Batman, it'd be literally 5 minutes at absolute most.
Also, Batman in this film is disturbingly perfectly fine with the excessive murder his team-mates get up to in this film. I'd have to watch again to check, but I'm pretty sure he never actually killed anyone in the film himself, but he never raises any issue with the fact everyone else he works with are killers, including Lady Shiva.
TL;DR:
We have a badly paced, badly written film with mediocre animation, a pointless period setting and there is no point to this movie's entire existence.
Just don't bother with this one, they clearly had no idea what they wanted to accomplish with this one, so ended up accomplishing nothing at all.
Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Disappointing jump-scare fest
This is a horror film with a lot of potential from the premise alone. Sam Rami returns to his horror film roots with a great idea: Christie Brown (Alison Lohman) makes a selfish choice, dooming a woman to poverty and soon death. The old lady gets revenge, cursing Christie so she'll be (as the title suggests) dragged to hell in a few days if she doesn't prevent it.
To get some positives out of the way, this film is overall shot quite well. It has Raimi's fingerprints all over it, from the weird ways the camera moves, to the cartoonish acting of many characters, to just plain strange audio and visual moments. All of these are directorial signatures, and they are sometimes used effectively. It's also a very vibrant film, very pleasing to look at. Too often in films (not just horror movies, but even ones which are meant to be lighter in tone), directors suck all the colour out, add annoying film grain and jiggle the camera in every scene to add a false sense of tension and "realism." Not here, though. Here, the pacing and visuals are always interesting, and never get visually dull. For that alone, this got bumped up a few stars.
However, this film suffers in terms of plot and characterisation, plus a "twist" which is telegraphed so obviously and so obnoxiously early on, that I felt like screaming at the screen. Every scene from that moment on, I knew exactly how the film was going to end. Small toddlers (if their parents allowed them to watch this despite its gore) could see the ending coming. It was that obvious.
The biggest problem I have with this is the jump-scares. It's lazy, it's overplayed and after a while, they stop being effective. Jump scares are the lowest form of horror. It takes absolutely no effort to do. Just have everything quiet and show nothing, then suddenly loud noise. Boom, you've now frightened the audience and it took no actual work or talent to pull off. It's obnoxious and stupid and adds nothing. Worse yet, it feels like the film put them in as place-holders for actual horrifying scenes, then forgot to put the real scare in and left these dumb jumps in, adding orchestra strings to really accentuate them. Evil Dead I and II barely had jump scares in them. I'm pretty sure collectively, they had maybe one per film. But here, it's literally the only thing it's got in terms of scares, just that over and over and over.
It's also really dumb that, the thing Christie does really isn't that bad when you think about it. It's relatively unimportant plot-wise, so no spoiler tag, but the gypsy woman got angry because Christie doesn't allow her a fourth extension on her mortgage. That's it. This old lady hasn't paid her mortgage for years and has had multiple extensions already. But it's implied that isn't even what got the lady so mad. In that same scene, the old bat is begging, yelling, throwing herself to the ground and making a loud scene for everyone in the office to see, only to then say to Christie "...you shamed me!"
Erm... no, lady. You shamed yourself in front of everyone. And yeah, that's what gets Christie cursed, not giving a fourth extension on a motgage, a decision most insurance companies would make under those circumstances.
There's also a problem with a lack of stakes here. If you go back and watch Evil Dead I and II, Ash gets beaten up twelve ways from Sunday, but it actually affects him. He gets a bloody nose, bruises, cuts etc. His hand gets sawed off and he screams from it. Yet with Christie in this film, she gets thrown into the ceiling, bashed, a massive metal cross smashes into her face, she's nearly drowned... yet none of it affects her. Hell, her MAKEUP isn't even affected. She just bounces back from what should be catastrophic injuries like it's nothing. And this isn't trying to be a cartoony, silly film like Army of Darkness, which was basically a horror version of a looney tunes short, it's meant to be a bit more serious than AoD.
Finally, there's the odd comedy segments. These try very hard to recapture that Evil Dead horror-comedy style scenes, but fail pretty dismally. The tone of, say, EDII was pretty consistent throughout, with time devoted to the pathos and dark comedy in different degrees, but never feeling too much like tonal whiplash. Here, though, there's suddenly goofy, dancing possessed people, a foul-mouth goat with a bad attitude and all sorts of nonsense, all out of nowhere. It's awkward and doesn't match the rest of the film.
Overall, this was a mediocre product. Not great, not that terrible. Just okay.
There were those saying this could be the closest we ever got to having a "real" Evil Dead 3 or Army of Darkness 2. Luckily that's not true. If you want Sam Raimi coming back and showing us what he can do with Evil Dead after a few decades, just watch the show Ash vs The Evil Dead. It has its flaws, but it's really great fun and a HELL of a lot better than this trash.
Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020)
Garbage. Unfunny. Don't watch.
I could feel my brain cells dying while watching this show. It feels like the creators watched Rick and Morty, and decided to make their own version without understanding what made that show even remotely good.
The animation is bottom-tier, the writing is obnoxious and shallow, the voice actors grate on my nerves and nearly every character is unbearably annoying. The worst is definitely Ensign Becket Mariner, her brand of selfish, self-absorbed, arrogant, over-the-top idiocy is basically ear poison for me. By contrast, the only likeable character overall was D'Vana Tendi, whose newcomer excitedness and enthusiasm for her new job was endearing and quite sweet.
The first scene is an exercise in "how unlikeable and annoying can we make our central characters?"
This feels like one of those terrible College Humour animated shorts, the ones which run on for too long and absolutely murder comedy with every second they're on screen. Except this is worse, because it's officially licensed content by the real company. If this show was just some random YouTube video made in somebody's basement and put up for free, I'd give it a pass.
This show should not have the official Trek stamp put on it. It should really be more like The Orville, or Red Dwarf, or Galaxy Quest -- joke shows (or, film in the latter case) utilising elements of Trek but being their own thing.
As it is, at best it's a mediocre animated parody, at worse it's despicable and repellant with some truly terrible jokes.
Street Fighter (1994)
Silly, flawed, bizarre, but AMAZING
Look, I'm not going to pretend this is technically a good movie from an objective sense. It's not, and we all know that it's not. Its mis-steps and foibles are many and varied, and in a story sense, it hardly resembles the game it is based on (not that there was much plot in the game, or games in general, back in the 90s).
However, when you consider what they had to work with, it's a miracle this film came out as well as it did. It's easily one of the best transitions from videogames to movie theatres. Admittedly, there's not a lot of competition as there hasn't really been a legit "good" movie based on a game in the long and storied history of adaptations.
There are, however, a LOT of positives to this film. Raul Julia, for example, is utterly magnificent as M. Bison in this film. He truly captured what made Bison such a compelling villain, and surprisingly manages to pull off that silly costume with class and style. He apparently researched a great deal for this role, looking into how historical dictators have spoken, and discussing the character of Bison with his children, Street Fighter 2 fans themselves. He takes the role completely seriously, giving a straight performance. In the scene between himself and Chun-Li (her backstory taken right out of the game, almost exactly -- with the exception she's a reporter instead of working for Interpol now), he sells every moment. He follows her dramatic monologue about how he ruined her life with simple words:
"For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me... it was Tuesday."
That's not just a good performance, it's honestly good writing in itself. Raul Julia and Ming-Na-Wen are both stellar actors, and they bounced off each other incredibly well during that scene in particular. Even the music of the scene was great, enhancing the tone and feel expertly.
The jokes of the film are a mixed bag. Some, like the famous "Quick, change the channel!" line of Sagat's still gets a good laugh, even from people who hate this film. Others have either aged badly, or were never funny in the first place. Though there is a lot to be said for unintentional hilarity in scenes which were (I think?) supposed to be taken seriously.
The biggest weakness, in my opinion, is Jean-Claude Van-Damme. In all honesty, he is and always has been a discount, low-rent, lamer and less interesting version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has no charm, charisma, acting talent or even fighting prowess, leaving much of his stunts and battling to others. That last point usually isn't a problem, but in a film based on a fighting game, it does make it less convincing and more boring whenever Van-Damme is on screen. IMO, they should have gotten a better actor. Even the aforementioned talented cast such as Raul Julia and Ming-Na-Wen struggle to hold the film while Van-Damme is on camera, sucking the life and charm out of every scene he's in.
Looking past that, it's mostly a fun film with colourful and lively characters, a bizarre and self-aware ridiculous plot, mostly a good cast with funny scenes (even when they're not supposed to be), and is the final film of Raul Julia's entire career before his too-soon departure from us.
It's not perfect, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a tonne of fun. If anything I said makes you interested in this film, please do yourself a favour, ignore the bad reviews and just give it a watch.
8/10, would watch again.
Superboy (1988)
Justly forgotten junk show
This is truly atrocious. The plots are not only poorly formulated, they're laughable. The acting is beyond forced and awkward. Pretty much nobody puts in a good performance, it's hilarious watching these no-talent people try to put in actual performances. Mr Mxyzptlk is particularly embarrassing; he's supposed to be this hilarious, larger-than-life, boisterous character with an exuberant voice, mocking and teasing Superman (in this case, Superboy). Here he's flat, dull and lifeless.
Then there's the costume department. I'm sure they were on a low budget, but characters like Metallo look half-finished, cheap and ridiculous. Even on a meager budget, surely they could've done SOMEthing better--even Lois & Clark, only a couple years later, did better on all levels than this show.
The writing doesn't help either. Nobody could make the stilted dialogue work. Occasionally the show will try to explore their characters, like Clark's fears of rejection or judgement for his alien nature. None of that is handled well at all, but it's there.
Frankly, all of this was done better in the early seasons of Smallville about 20 years later. This show barely justifies its own existence. If you want to have a good laugh at a cheap show where clearly nobody cared what made it on screen, take a look. If you're looking for a genuinely well made superhero show featuring Clark Kent, look elsewhere.
Angela Anaconda (1999)
Hated it as a kid, hate it as an adult
I never quite understood the deranged children who enjoyed this series. When I was a kid, and Angela Anaconda would air in between actual cartoon series (sometimes giving intro's and outro's to things for some reason), I always found her bizarre art style, disturbing stuck facial expressions, and horrendously shrill voice both horrifying and annoying as that one troll with bad grammar who knows exactly how to infuriate you.
That's what Angela Anaconda is, ultimately, as a character. She's a troll. A disturbed sociopath who, from all indications of this show, will likely have a bell tower, a rifle, and 25-to-life some time in her future.
Please, people aren't kidding when they say this show is insane, and will drive you to the same. For your sake, and for the sake of prosperity yet to come, don't watch. Burn every copy. RUN FOR YOUR LIIIIIIVES!!!
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
A moronic mess.
This is the worst representation of Superman on-screen yet. Man of Steel was already a complete failure of a film on most levels, and this continues that trend.
To site a positive, Snyder shoots the film well and the action scenes are intense. Some of the actors work well in their roles, especially Affleck. Henry Cavill remains only "okay" in his role as Superman. That concludes all the positives.
Superman and Batman are both murderers in this movie. With Superman's killing of Zod, arguments could easily be made as to the necessity of that, but when he outright murders a terrorist for no real reason, that crosses the line and entirely screws up on him as a character on all levels.
The pacing is terrible, feeling like two movies--neither of them a good one--and is 60% set- up for future Justice League films I hope to god never actually come about.
DC is clearly trying to catch up to Marvel, and doing a terrible job of it, introducing character after character who don't belong here. They even go as far as to kill off iconic Superman characters like Jimmy Olsen seconds after their appearance because they "didn't have room for them." That alone kills any credibility this DCU had in my eyes.
This is an utter mess, the plot is simultaneously nonexistent and overly convoluted, and its characters are thinly sketched at best. Superman has no definable personality traits beyond being an idiot, gullible, overly violent ass hole.
I give this one star, and only for some neat visuals.
Screw this movie.
Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (2013)
Pretty average story
I'm pretty surprised and confused to see everybody going on about how supposedly amazing this movie is. To me, this is entirely middle-of-the-road with nothing special about it, besides for how hyper-violent it is at times.
Basic plot is that Flash has accidentally changed the time-line because of his selfish need to save his mother, and now the world is at war, everything is wrong, and he has to put it right.
I will say that the animation is pretty great here, some of the best that the DC Animated Movies have done. However, a lot of the character designs are horrendously ugly. Aquaman and Superman look like hideous mutated freaks, with frankly deformed faces. Characters like The Flash who really ought to look sleek and fast just look like over-muscled steroid abusers. And as for Wonder Woman's face, good god I have no idea what the designers were going for there, it's just bizarre, with the tiniest mouth imaginable, and massive yet dead-looking eyes.
The plot has been done many times before in other films and shows, especially with superheroes. The only thing that really sets this apart from the rest is the aforementioned hyper-violence and mass death. There's a lot of death, gore, blood splatters and previously heroic characters being portrayed as horrific murderers... even when that makes no sense. For instance, Wonder Woman is now a brutal warrior queen who hacks innocent children into pieces, with little-to- no regard for human life. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I get that this is supposed to be an altered time-line, but the events she goes through really don't in any way explain her entire personality and morality being so radically different. I just can't see Wonder Woman being this way simply because of what Aquaman did to start this war. Same goes with Aquaman who, again, has an entirely different personality and morality set, despite literally nothing occurring that would make him like this. It all feels far too forced and in-your-face.
About the only interesting character, really, is Batman. In this world, Bruce Wayne was killed in the alley instead of Thomas and Martha. Now, Thomas Wayne is Batman and Martha is Joker. Sadly, the movie really doesn't do anything interesting with this concept besides the implication that Martha's the Joker now (which is handled in a rather silly way) and Thomas Wayne being a murderer and nihilist. There is a good moment that has Thomas give Flash a letter to give to Bruce, a sort of final goodbye and note of love from him. This is probably the most emotionally effective moment of the film, but then it's immediately back to the "everybody dies" motif that the movie follows.
There are a lot of scenes in this movie that really don't need to be here. An entire sequence is dedicated to showing Aquaman's troops invading a boat with a collection of random DC characters, only for pretty much everyone to die. It serves absolutely no purpose to the story and is just there to have more death and gore. If we had instead used that time to explore either Aquaman or Wonder Woman's motivations, and see what actually lead them to become who they are in this world, then the film could have been a lot better in that regard. As it is, it's just a neat but ultimately useless bit of padding, and it's annoying that there are so many scenes exactly like it. That's ultimately what this entire world is in its entirety, just one long obstacle that Flash has to overcome. There are a lot of sub-plots and minor characters who are ultimately entirely pointless to follow as it's all just a temporary world that Flash is going to replace anyway, and the movie does little to make you care about any of it. The biggest question for me is, why is this even called Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox when the Justice League have nothing at all to do with the story overall, and are only really in it for five minutes at the start?
Overall, this really has been massively over-hyped in my opinion, unless you're really into "world gone wrong" stories and want to see a bunch of characters with little-to-no development or established personalities get slaughtered in various ways. Not a bad movie, but certainly not as good as people make it out to be.
Man of Steel (2013)
A terrible reflection of Superman on almost all counts
I will start with good points:
Jonathan Kent has one scene where he really does feel like the character he's meant to be. When Clark learns at last that he is from another world, he comforts Clark and embraces him in his arms;
Clark: Can't I just keep pretending I'm your son? Jonathan: You are my son.
Likewise, there are some scenes with Jor-El that work. For instance, when he says "You are as much a child of Earth as you are of Krypton" as opposed to the Donner version, who was obsessed with Clark abandoning his human emotions and embracing his Kryptonian heritage above all else... despite admitting that the Kryptonians' arrogance destroyed them. MoS Jor-El sees the differences, and says that humanity's difference from Krypton could be a good thing since it could lead them to not make the same mistakes.
There are some beautiful moments in this film that show Superman as hopeful and inspiring. For instance, the scene where he first learns to fly has always been my favourite part of the film, and has one of the few instances of vibrancy of colour, and Clark actually smiling. And, when he's rising up to destroy the "World Engine" to save the world, likewise it's quite well handled.
Now, though, I get to what kills the film for me:
I used to think it just wasn't to my tastes, that it was over-dark and over-grim for Superman... but now, I flat-out think it was incompetent on a lot of levels, with many stupid scenes that make no sense and add up to a whole lot of nothing.
We spend FAR too long, and have far too much focus on Krypton. The story has not changed in almost any version besides this one. Doomed planet, arrogant council who don't believe Jor-El, goodbye to son, rocket. That's it... yet here we've got a ridiculous amount of action, explosions, fighting, the weird skull codex thing that isn't explained why it's a skull, weird symbolism, the "birthing matrix" that looks like... well, The Matrix pods... it's kind of a mess.
In that same opening, Zod is pretty pathetic--he seriously gets his ASS KICKED by Jor-El! A SCIENTIST, and the supposedly great military general, genetically bread to be a soldier and fighter... gets his butt kicked by essentially a nerd. Seriously! And do I even need to go into the "I WILL FIND HIM!!!" line? It's hilariously out of place, and I giggled so much at that. When Zod yelled stuff like that in the original, it fit the tone of the film and he had consistent funny, goofy moments balanced out with intimidating ones. Here, though... it's just a weird bit of laughter- inducing out-of-nowhere silliness.
After that, we have so many random cuts to different points in the film at entirely random intervals that it's really difficult to tell what the hell each scene is meant to mean most of the time, and the flashbacks are so jarring, unnatural, brief and out-of-order that we don't even know when they're supposed to be, and what they're supposed to link to. Most of these scenes would probably be fine if told in a proper sequence, but they aren't, so I'm left not having a clue what to think about them.
So often in this film, it'll feel as if it's about to explore the characters, build towards something, explain something about their personalities, and JUST as it's about to do so something explodes, or there's a crash, or the ambush-tornado turns up.
The tornado scene is one of the most idiotic moments of the movie. Pretty much everything is wrong with it, from Jonathan seeing a trapped dog and sending his invulnerable super-strong son AWAY to hide under a bridge, only to try to save the dog himself (because Clark, a young 20- something fit man saving the dog is suspicious? But the 50+ year-old-man doing it is perfectly normal?) to the complete fundamental misunderstanding of tornadoes actually work on every level.
Zod captures Superman in his fortress--Clark being the ONE GUY that he needs for his plan to succeed--and he puts absolutely no guards on him, just some weedy guy who immediately runs away. Oh, and weedy scientist outright states that Clark DOES NOT have his super-powers that he gets from the sun... and yet, a couple minutes later, with no exposure to sunlight, he breaks the bonds with super-strength. There is no excuse for that level of lazy writing
The villains are idiotic at almost every turn. They give no reason for why they have to make this new Krypton civilisation on Earth, they just want to because there'd be no movie otherwise.
The climax of the movie, the final fight between Supes and Zod was never supposed to be in the movie to begin with. That was added later at the request of the studio who wanted one more fight. So, that scene of Superman snapping Zod's neck wasn't part of any directorial or writing vision. And that very much shows. None of the scenes following it make any reference to it, and the tone is so jarringly different that we seriously smash- cut from him screaming about killing Zod, to him joking about destroying government equipment and smiling.
I hope that in the future it'll be justly left in the dust and practically forgotten.
Son of Batman (2014)
Awful. Just awful.
This is the single worst Batman movie to date. I truly believe this is worse than Batman and Robin, because at least that film is funny.
The plot makes no sense, the villain's motivations are frankly ridiculously stupid and nonsensical, the fights are uninspired, Damian Wayne is at his worst in terms of insufferable characterisation and insipid, mean-spirited dialogue, the voice acting ranges from fairly good to the worst I've heard in professional animation.
Deathstroke is changed from an incredible and intelligent fighter into a pathetic, idiotic bumbler who gets knocked out with one punch from Batman. The supposedly unstoppable army of Man-Bats are actually less effective and far dumber than normal human beings, and stopped in one of the weakest anti-climaxes I've ever seen. The plot is so poorly handled that I honestly started to laugh out loud at what were supposed to be tense scenes. That's not even getting into the scene between Batman and Talia which seems to suggest the writers are rape apologists--yes, Bruce states he was drugged and raped by Talia, but that it was "not all bad" which is undoubtedly the most horribly awful thing I've heard in a DC movie.
Bottom line, I only recommend this to people if you want a truly hilariously inept film to watch and laugh about with your friends, which is precisely what I did after trying to watch it on my own.