In his revelatory best-selling 1983 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man) emphatically states that in Hollywood, for all its wealth, glamour and technical wizardry, when it comes to plotting a new film's financial prospects, "nobody knows anything". To appreciate the enduring wisdom and accuracy of that now famous quote, one need look no further than the current box-office where a relatively obscure, third-tier comic superhero called Deadpool continues to bask in the glow of a thousand hosannas while Batman v Superman, featuring comicdom's two most famous superheroes, has been summarily banished to the same critic-sanctioned movie jail wherein the much-reviled Fantastic Four and The Green Lantern currently languish. But while the two aforementioned films are genuine stinkers entirely deserving of their critical mauling, Zack Snyder's sequel (of sorts) to Man of Steel, its narrative and visual shortcomings notwithstanding, is not the unmitigated disaster the baying cabal of reviewers and fan-boys would have you believe.
