Kelly Lawler

USA TODAY

Batman and Superman may be fighting each other in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but the pair of superheroes have at least one common enemy, apparently: film critics.

The highly anticipated Zack Snyder-directed superhero extravaganza is not doing super well (pun very much intended) with critics since reviews began posting on Tuesday night. So far many (but not all) of the reviews have been, well, not great, giving the movie a pretty low Rotten Tomatoes score of 35%.

We rounded up excerpts from the reviews of the film you need to read, the good, the bad and the downright ugly.

The good

USA TODAY's own Brian Truitt: "BvS will please those either waiting for the two main players to lock horns on a movie screen, or those who've just been pining for Wonder Woman forever. And for the nerdier crowds, a fleeting glimpse at other superheroes hints this is the Dawn of something potentially sensational." (You can read the full 3 out of four star review here.)

The Philadelphia Inquirer: "There's a gravitas here that even the staleist of comic book tropes can't diminish. Snyder, who directed Man of Steel and the failed comic book adaptation Watchmen, is nothing less than respectful. The effects aren't bad, either."

Chicago Sun-Times: "When it sings, Dawn of Justice is a wonder. When it drags, it still looks good and offers hints of a better scene just around the corner."

Rolling Stone: "Snyder, juiced up by Hans Zimmer's caffeinated score, throws everything at the screen until resistance is futile. Better than Man of Steel but below the high bar set by Nolan's Dark Knight, Dawn of Justice is still a colossus, the stuff that DC Comics dreams are made of for that kid in all of us who yearns to see Batman and Superman suit up and go in for the kill."

The bad

The Village Voice: "The movie's not bad, but it doubles down on its least interesting and potent elements at the expense of those that actually work. In the end, the film is as forgettable as the dime-store philosophy that fuels it."

Entertainment Weekly: "Dawn of Justice starts off as an intriguing meditation about two superheroes turning to an all-too-human emotion: hatred out of fear of the unknown. Two and a half hours later it winds up somewhere very far from that—but at the same time, all too familiar. It’s another numbing smash-and-bash orgy of CGI mayhem with an ending that leaves the door open wide enough to justify the next 10 installments. Is it too late to demand a rematch?"

Time: "Why, oh why, can’t we just get what we came for? That is, a good, meat-and-potatoes showdown between a brooding vigilante in a pointy-eared mask (Ben Affleck’s Batman, a.k.a. asocial rich guy Bruce Wayne) and a simpler, sunnier protector of humankind (Henry Cavill’s Superman, who, when he’s not in tights, struts around in criminally sexy horn-rimmed glasses as reporter Clark Kent). Batman v Superman lunges for greatness instead of building toward it: It’s so top-heavy with false portent that it buckles under its own weight."

Empire: "There are moments that make the whole enterprise worthwhile, and introduces an intriguing new Batman. But it’s also cluttered and narratively wonky; a few jokes wouldn’t have gone amiss, either."

The ugly

The New York Times:"A diverting entertainment might have been made about the rivalry between these two muscle-bound paladins — a bromance or a buddy comedy, an album of duets. Batman v Superman, directed by Zack Snyder, is none of those things. It is about as diverting as having a porcelain sink broken over your head."

The New Republic : "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a joyless slog. Filled with scenes of gloomy characters confronting their demons or wrestling with their insipid moral quandaries, it’s not a superhero movie so much as it is an excruciating therapy session in which there are occasionally huge explosions and guys in capes."

The Daily Beast: "Zack Snyder’s would be game-changer sets the big business of spandexed spectacle back a step, because—shocker!—watching Batman and Superman rage at each other like little boys makes for a pretty tedious two and a half hours. When you walk away from the terminally unfocused BvS with no desire to see another Batman or Superman story ever again, someone up the chain has made a terrible mistake."

Hitfix: "It is an informercial. It is slick, and it is frequently very pretty, and from scene to scene, from moment to moment, it looks like a real movie. But without a beating heart, this is a wax figure, lifeless and frozen, a simulation. The studio asked Snyder to make them a 150-minute trailer for their entire slate of superhero films, and he certainly did. Sadly, like most infomercials, this one promises more than it delivers, and two-and-a-half hours of being hustled left me cold. Whatever it’s selling, I’m not buying."

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. "