Welcome to The Morning After (I know it’s afternoon, but I somehow forgot to finish my write-ups, so lunchtime writing did transpire), where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice

How do you solve a problem like Zack Snyder? Giving a director like Snyder free reign over a comic empire is a dangerous prospect. Although 300 and Watchmen were fairly popular at the box office, they weren’t very good movies. Bother suffered from over-indulgence, pomposity and a lack of control. They were excessively violent and not particularly compelling. The same can unfortunately be said for Man of Steel, Snyder’s prior exploration of the DC comics universe.

This time out, congress has convened a hearing to determine whether Superman (Henry Cavill) is a menace or an asset. It’s the culmination of events from the first film plus a bloodbath at a small desert compound where Superman’s girlfriend Lois Lane (Amy Adams) was seized. Before the events of this film, he had already made an enemy of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), the billionaire philanthropist whose Wayne Enterprises building in Metropolis was destroyed during the attack Superman waged on General Zod in the first film. Now, the two titans are facing off while being egged on by Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg). And Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) is there.

All of the problems that have plagued Snyder’s films is present here. He spends too much time pontificating on how clever he is that he never stops to realize that his emperor is naked. Superficial concepts of divine intervention, conflation of ego and vengeance over peace are hammered in at regular intervals. The audience is never permitted to form its own opinions as they are pushed right into their faces forcing them to agree with them.

Where Snyder fails, the cast picks up the slack. Apart from a surprisingly lackluster Adams and a horribly miscast Eisenberg, the film’s performances are several steps above what typically passes for acting in a Snyder film. Cavill doesn’t quite have the humanity of Christopher Reeve, but his sometimes distant, sometimes affecting emotional responses seem to fit the character well. Affleck conveys anger better than most actors, and were his character better written, he might have fully pulled off a resurrection of his blockbuster acting career.

Gadot is a surprisingly strong fit. Although there was much grief over her casting, she turns out to be a potent element in the film. She is largely relegated to support and her character’s storyline is mismanaged, but what she does with what she has is excellent and her potent shared fight sequence at the end of the film is better than I would have anticipated.

Daredevil, season 2

While the Marvel comics universe have been a bit brighter and more broadly appealing, DC has focused on the dour, dark and brooding side of the superhero world. Marvel turned that on its ear with its introduction of the Netflix series, which started off in spectacular fashion with Daredevil and continued impressively with Jessica Jones. While we’re still waiting on the other two Netflix Marvel series (Luke Cage and Iron Fist), we’ve been given the second season of Daredevil and the cracks are, unfortunately, beginning to show.

With a season-long villain during the first year, Daredevil told a fascinating and brutal story in thirteen episodes that was easily among the best any comic book adaptation has accomplished. This season, however, the main villain is an amorphous entity that’s barely tackled early on and only becomes more urgently oppressive several episodes in. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t an interesting plotline, but how the makers get there is sometimes disappointing.

Where the series becomes a bit frustrating is in its introduction of a number of new characters, a troubling trend for superhero productions. Introducing a single new villain is tough enough, but by infusing it with a new villain group and two new semi-good associates along with a irritating DA and a handful of other potentially ruinous characters, we’re left wondering which threads the writers want to focus on and none of them feel particularly fleshed out.

The performances are still strong with the notable exception of Elden Henson whose Foggy Nelson has been reduced to a mopey, aggressive pedant who seems like he doesn’t want to even be in the show any longer. While his motivations are understandable, it doesn’t stop the performance from feeling grating. Charlie Cox and Deborah Ann Woll continue to turn in excellent work while Joe Berenthal’s introduction of The Punisher is one of the most welcome cast additions. Meanwhile, Elodie Yung as Elektra is distracting, unfocused and not particularly compelling. Whether that’s an error on the part of the writers or the actress is hard to tell as the problems stem from the story more often than the performance, but the performance is so frequently unlikable that it feels like a byproduct of an meager actress.

There are a lot of positive elements to the story, but quite a few frustrating ones. The sequence set in the prison is the most exasperating as it draws in seemingly pointless narrative threads that could have been eliminated to give some focus to other characters and situations. This lack of structure and inability to focus hurts the series more than anything. However, now that these new characters have been introduced, perhaps we can avoid any new, excessive figures in the next iteration and develop a 13-episode story that is uniform and flows from beginning to end without feeling like it’s dragging its feet to extend to the full episode allotment because of a lack of narrative complexity.