The Batman, directed by Matt Reeves, dropped in theaters earlier this week much to the joy of hundreds of thousands of long term DC fans around the world, including myself. So you can hardly imagine my disappointment when the $100 million budget film with an 85% score on The Batman – Rotten Tomatoes was utterly average. Reeves dropped the ball big time on this film that had so much potential with stars such as Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright and Colin Farrell.

While the cinematography was stunning and was coupled with some of the best music you will ever hear, it does little to make up for the needlessly complex, heavily drawn out three-hour spanning bellyflop of a plot. What’s the point of making a visually stunning movie if your audience can hardly stay awake through it, much less know what is actually going on. 

We know and love Batman for the fighting scenes, Bruce Wayne’s internal and external struggles and his cool tech, but this film was nothing more than a play-detective snoozefest. There were dozens of names and useless characters tossed around during the film that had little connection to the actual plot. 

The screenwriters worked so hard on trying to make all of the pieces of The Riddlers puzzle fit together that they somehow forgot how real people actually talk. A good hour of the film could have been cut if they had just scrapped the repetitive dialog between characters and Bruce’s poor ramblings about justice, darkness and so forth. 

Most of the dialog was a joke, excluding anything said by The Penguin (Colin Farrell) who single-handedly saved this film with his comical dialog. His character was one of few that stayed true to the originals without coming across as cliche or cheap. Thank goodness Warner Bros didn’t tarnish our favorite little snarky mob boss. 

Even Kravitz as Cat Woman didn’t have a terrible performance, but it was clear that she was solely included to move the plot along to its droning end.

By the time I left the theater, it was clear that everyone else with me was just as glad that it had finally ended. To then search the internet for other negative reviews and find only the loving ravings of longtime DC fans who support the franchise to the death was so disappointing. I was baffled when, upon looking up reviews online, how much people loved it. I’m not sure what movie they saw, but no one in the theater was praising DC after the three hour trainwreck we had to endure.

I love Robert Pattinson, and The Batman gave him a great upgrade from his broody, elementary role of Edward Cullen in the Twilight saga. I see a lot of potential for him, especially in the expected Batman sequel, but until DC Entertainment Inc gets their affairs and sloppy storylines in order, you won’t be seeing me in the theaters for a Warner Bros film anytime soon.

Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Jeffrey Wright played The Penguin, The Penguin was actually played by Colin Farrell. This version was updated to reflect those changes.