The a-story is about Tony's alcoholism and depression and father issues, and the b-story is about some guy who is angry. The a-story's big action sequence (the best of the film) is against his best friend. Then Tony cures all his psychological problems and flies off because he remembers there's still a b-story to wrap up. The b-story action sequence is very long, and poorly filmed, and darkly lit, and with a lot of bad CGI. It is boring and takes forever and, because it is the b-story, you know it's not very important. It deflates what was otherwise a decent movie.
Also notable is that Terrence Howard is replaced by Don Cheadle. Imagine being in a huge superhero franchise only to find out that not only have you been replaced by a Golden Girl, but not even one of the more well-known Golden Girls.
I don't agree with Scorsese about superhero movies, but I have to admit that this one really helps his case. The individual scenes are all very good, but they don't actually coalesce into any kind of story, only the vague outline of something resembling a plot. It's like a short film anthology. Jack Nicholson plays the same character he always plays. There's a bunch of good music by Prince, which is awesome but doesn't fit the movie in any way.
It was always one of the weaker superhero movies, but it's worse today: Batman and the Joker are totally played out, and their weird creepy fans have destroyed whatever appeal they still have left after so much overexposure.
Bill Griffith, of Zippy fame, was the one who turned me onto Ernie Bushmiller's genius. Now Griffith has written a graphic novel biography called "Three Rocks: The Ernie Bushmiller Story". Here are excerpts.
It has nice CGI but, other than that, it's an extremely predictable, by-the-books, middle-of-the-road, run-of-the-mill, average superhero movie. The climax involves him boring the bad guy into giving up, and I sympathize.
On my world "Zack Snyder" means "It will be boring and stupid but I'll still watch it anyway for some reason".
