There is a jar of pee in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. It plays a fairly significant role in a major scene around halfway through the movie. In fact, it’s a large part of the villain’s evil plot in this particular scene, I think. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, because the scene is much more interested in slowly zooming in on the jar of pee than it is in things like explaining the villain’s evil plot and what said jar of pee has to do with that plot.

A jar of pee on its own is not enough to derail a movie. (Okay, it probably is, but let’s pretend for a second that it isn’t.)  In the midst of the muddled philosophies and baffling storytelling decisions that make up Dawn of Justice, though, this jar of pee serves as a pretty effective metaphor for the whole godforsaken mess.

The movie picks up two years after the events of Man of Steel, roughly twenty years after the events of a spin-off Batman movie that hasn’t been released yet, and roughly one hundred years after the events of a spin-off Wonder Woman movie that has also not been released yet. We open with a stylishly-shot reminder that Bruce Wayne’s parents are dead and he is into bats, and then segue directly into a relatively effective redo of the climax of Man of Steel, this time from Wayne’s perspective. All of this works; we’re pretty much spoonfed Batman’s motive for wanting to beat up on Superman, but at least it’s a motive that exists.

Remember when the Internet was upset about Ben Affleck playing Batman? Well, he acquits himself pretty well here, probably forging out a place as the star of a few Justice League movies over the next couple of years. His Batman is a furious and brutal torturer, beaten down by years of crime-fighting, who fears the absolute power of a man from another world (Reasonably so). Affleck plays the role well, and the character actually has a barely legitimate arc, which is more than can be said for anyone else in the film.  Affleck’s Bruce Wayne is the real highlight, shockingly. He’s doing some kind of Bruce Springsteen impression, and it works incredibly well. Anytime Affleck-as-Wayne is onscreen, the movie is–fleetingly–fun.

Henry Cavill’s Superman forms the other half of the punchy equation, and the movie doesn’t do nearly as well on this side. The most positive thing I can say about Zack Snyder’s incarnation of Superman is that Cavill does his very best, and at least he and Lois have a healthy sex life. He shares no discernible qualities with any version of Superman I’ve ever encountered, and the movie seems utterly uninterested in showing us Clark’s perspective as the world (and, hilariously, Charlie Rose) asks the question “Must there be a Superman?” Snyder likes the way the question sounds, but he never answers it.  The film is much more interested in the glowering Titan’s heat vision-blaring eyes than it is in anything going on behind those eyes.

There’s a major issue here, even before the movie gets into the villain (Jesse Eisenberg, doing...something as Lex Luthor) and his diabolical plot to do...something. This is a movie where two iconic heroes are set against one another, and in a movie like that, ideally, the audience sees elements of both sides’ arguments. Here, both sides seem equally despicable: Batman brands criminals with a burning Bat-logo, and Superman, well, is still having trouble being anyone even vaguely resembling Superman. When Luthor enters the picture, the movie seems on the verge of discovering its plot, only to take a faceplant into a maze of political machinations and heavy-handed allegory-speak about Greek gods. Also, Kryptonite shows up and Luthor feeds someone a Jolly Rancher.

Nothing makes much sense, and the movie trudges on for a while without a lot happening. We meet Wonder Woman. She exchanges some cursory patter with Affleck-as-Springsteen-as-Wayne. We have our first action scene of the movie, a bland, hard-to-follow Batmobile chase where Batman racks up a body count worthy of a sequel to Man of Steel. All of this is odd, because for a movie called Batman v Superman, very little versing, or general fight preparation of any kind, has occurred. Batman has nightmares about Superman, but the dreams seem more interested in setting up a movie about Ezra Miller’s Flash than they do in laying any kind of groundwork for the titanic clash.

Ultimately, Luthor pulls his strings, and Batman and Superman (who are almost painfully stupid in this movie, by the way), are fooled, and we finally get our four minutes of action. And it’s fine. Batman hits Superman over the head with a sink, Superman growls and shouts. Then it’s over! The resolution to the fight is painless, slightly nonsensical, and just like that, the pair are suddenly friends. Or at least, one of them claims that they’re friends. Or something. It all feels more like a desperate attempt to check off a series of boxes leading to the Justice League movie, a studio-provoked assault on anything approaching thematic consistency. That isn’t to say that Snyder and the screenwriters are blameless: Take out every reference to future films that the movie has to offer, and the movie is still a tangle of poorly written character motivations and indistinguishable computer-generated explosions.
Really, the movie asks more questions than it answers. Just before the climactic boss fight, the filmmakers shove a series of trailers for different movies down our throat, and they range from just boring (a clip of the Flash causing property damage in a gloomy convenience store) to actively hilarious (Jason Momoa’s Aquaman trying desperately to hold his breath and swing his trident at the same time). Snyder and his cohorts ask us if we care about Superman anymore, and simultaneously assume we don’t. They ask us if we’d prefer just a bunch of Batman movies instead of these dour, rainy face-offs. They beg us repeatedly, “Do you like this? How about this? Is this okay? Which will you give us a billion dollars for?”

In the end, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and her skittery guitar theme form the only future Intellectual Property that seems halfway interesting. And the movie’s painfully unambiguous final shot won’t leave anyone burning to find out what happens next. Like the film, everything that will happen once the credits roll is painfully telegraphed. The only real question Batman v Superman leaves its audience with is “Whose pee was that, anyway?”