Spoiler warning: Our review of Batman V Superman contains minor plot spoilers, but little beyond what you can figure out from the film’s trailers.

Kids have spent decades arguing over which of DC's two major superheroes, Batman and Superman, would prevail in a fight. That's all well and good for a schoolyard, but the bigger question might be why the stars of this week's Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice would find it necessary to wage war. It's the question I kept coming back to as I watched director Zack Snyder do his damnedest to trash both heroes' legacies in one fell swoop.

Viewers will have many opportunities to mock, belittle, and cringe at his take on DC Comics' ultimate fan service fantasy, as Batman V Superman suffers from painful dialogue, flat acting, humorless characters, and baffling plot leaps all over planet Earth. Perhaps worse than all of those shortcomings, however, is how Snyder hangs his film's 2 hours and 40 minutes runtime on the most unconvincing superhero disagreement imaginable.

What a scattershot plot

Metropolis's across-the-bay distance from Gotham City is emphasized at the outset of Batman V Superman—where, apparently, one of Bruce Wayne's colossal office towers stands. Gotham's finest (played this time by Ben Affleck) flies in a helicopter across the bay to check on things during the events of 2013's Man of Steel—meaning, he's catching the tail-end of Superman and General Zod's massive battle from that film. Wayne arrives just in time to see his Metropolis tower come crumbling down.

Wayne runs toward the wreckage and finds a man trapped under a block of concrete who is screaming about his legs. The victim somehow stops being concerned long enough to look at Wayne and exclaim, "You're... the boss, boss." Seconds later, Wayne finds a little girl who has appeared at the fallen tower seconds after its collapse yet looks totally unscathed. "We're gonna find your mom," Wayne says, although there's no apparent reason to believe that she's looking for a parent (let alone a specific parent).

Next—wham—the camera cuts to "somewhere in the Indian Ocean." A pair of children discover a statue's head underwater and drag it up to give to a haggard-looking white man, who smashes it to reveal a bunch of glistening green crystals (assumedly, Kryptonite). But before we can get our globe-trotting bearings, the film warps its viewers to Nairobi, where Lois Lane (played by Amy Adams) dramatically snarls at a robe-wearing man holding a machine gun and camping out at an apparent terrorist stronghold. "I'm not a lady, I'm a journalist," she says. Within minutes, Lane's intrepid photographer is revealed to be a CIA agent, nearly everyone gets shot, and Superman magically appears—giving a knowing nod to Lane before plowing into her captor and saving her life.

Confused yet? Good, because now we're sitting in a Congressional hearing in the United States, where an angry senator screams about this whole Nairobi event and blames Superman for deaths—even though barely any Americans were apparently involved. "He answers to no one," Senator Finch (played by Holly Hunter) grumbles. "Not even, I think, to God." Who in the US military greenlit this Nairobi mission? What was the point of Lane going there? Dunno, but this film needs to establish Superman hate somehow.

The next five scenes, which whip by in roughly 14 minutes, feel just as scattershot. Lane relaxes in a bathtub while arguing with Clark Kent (played once more by Henry Cavill) about the seriousness of their relationship and the number of people who died in Nairobi ("I don't know if it's possible... for you to love me and be you"), which he magically dispels by handing her a rose and kissing her in the tub. (Really, she laughs the whole thing off.) Then we're whisked to a creepy underground dungeon filled with over a dozen enslaved women, where we follow a policeman on his way to finding a tied-up perp—and an apparent sex trafficker—while Batman hangs out perched on the ceiling, apparently waiting for the cop to show up before grimacing at said officer and vanishing.

It's tiring enough cataloguing those scenes, but they don't even get to the latest incarnation of Wayne's butler Alfred—now a philosophical mechanic (played by Jeremy Irons) who prattles about "what turns men cruel"—or the aforementioned legless man devolving into a fatalistic conspiracy theorist. There's also the first appearance of Lex Luthor, played by Jesse Eisenberg.

If the film's insistence on hopping from scene to scene doesn't make you feel disoriented, Eisenberg's shockingly bad turn as a villain will. While comparisons between this film's super-rich tech billionaire and Eisenberg's recent turn as Mark Zuckerberg seem obvious, Batman v Superman doesn't contain any of the neurotic nuance that made The Social Network a pretty solid film. Here, Eisenberg's arsenal of expression is limited to two maneuvers employed ad nauseum: making his face twitch and shrieking loudly. The result looks like a freshman college student who got really high, saw Heath Ledger's Joker, and got inspired to join a local improv group.