The second slump of Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck has already lived many Hollywood lives for someone who's only 44. In fact, Monday was his 44th birthday. Happy birthday, Ben.

The reviews of Suicide Squad couldn't have made a very good birthday present, but then again, he's not in that movie very much. It's not really "his" project. Actually, he's not even credited.

However, those reviews do impact him as a bellweather of the enterprise in which he has gotten himself so intricately entwined. Simply (and crudely) put, Ben Affleck is balls deep in the DC cinematic universe, about which nothing is currently going well.

So when I forecast a second slump for Ben Affleck, it's not that it's totally upon us yet. It's that we will be living through it for the next three to five years.

But let's first look back at his first slump. In fact, let's go back even further than that. Some of this is covered in this post, but just so you don't have to click on any links, I'll summarize it for you again.

Affleck was certainly around before then -- in fact, his first credited acting role was in 1981 -- but he burst on the scene in 1997 when Good Will Hunting forced us to recognize him and won him a screenwriting Oscar. This launched about a six-year period in which he could do no wrong -- or rather, the wrong he did do (like Pearl Harbor) did not stick to him.

Things changed when he got together with Jennifer Lopez. With Lopez he made Gigli and Jersey Girl, both flops, though his worst film of the ensuing period may have been 2004's Surviving Christmas. By 2006, Affleck somewhat involuntarily took a three-year hiatus from acting. Imagine that -- a big movie star being forced to step away from what he loved at the age of just 34. (However, it should be said that he did direct Gone Baby Gone in 2007.)

That period of infertility also lasted six years, if we want to define it as ending when he returned to acting in 2009 with a series of high-profile roles that were well received, plus two more successful features as director (The Town in 2010, Argo in 2012, the latter of which won best picture). There was no doubt Affleck was back, and perhaps the purest sign of that was Terence Malick casting him in 2013's To the Wonder.

But another six years have passed for Affleck, and things appear to be going south again. Twenty fourteen and 2015 were both relatively quiet for Affleck on the acting front, with just Gone Girl in 2014 and just "Brian Salty Flanigan" on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2015. (Hey, I'm just going by IMDB.) But that takes us to the end of 2015 without his fortunes really changing, which is convenient since I'm breaking down Affleck's career in six-year chunks.

Twenty sixteen appears to be the beginning of another Affleck downturn, and it all relates to his entrenchment in his new role of Batman. At the time of his casting it was viewed as just another feather in his cap, as there was every probability that another run of Batman movies would be both a critical and a financial success. But now that it has actually transpired and his name is signed on the dotted line for God knows how many umpteen more movies, we're starting to realize it may have been more of a curse than a blessing.

Simply put, the reviews for these first two DC movies he's appeared in have been devastating. Batman v. Superman was bad, but if possible, Suicide Squad has been even worse. The former has pulled down just a 44 on Metractric; the latter is four points lower than that.

So time for Affleck to reinvent himself again, right?

Nope.

The number of additional movies with which Batman is involved or rumored to be involved is staggering. Okay, it's three, but given the reaction to these first two movies, that's still staggering in terms of useful ways for Affleck to spend his time. Two Justice League movies (both directed by Zack Snyder) are set to come out in 2017 and 2019, and Untitled Batman Reboot has also been announced. Of course, they can't just be making one standalone Batman movie. Plus, I have to think Affleck's contract stipulates that DC can use him for anywhere from three to 27 additional movies, should they see it fit to make them. And since Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad will both be financial hits, the bean counters will surely be into that.

The gray in Bruce Wayne's hair in the photo above will certainly be real by the time all this is said and done.

Of course, it's always possible he continues to do good outside work while he's playing Batman. Robert Downey Jr. has managed to keep up a fairly active parallel series of jobs even while playing Tony Stark for eight years now. Affleck already has Gavin O'Connor's The Accountant scheduled for release later this year, and his own fourth directorial effort, Live by Night, scheduled for next year.

But the more DC scrambles to course correct, the more likely it is to take up more of his time and spread its stench to him.

So the dimensions of Affleck's second slump may be a bit different from his first one. The first time around, he was actively killing, or at least not helping, his films' prospects at the box office. This time, no such stink of failure may be attached to him. But his critical stink will be a heavy one, and that may be what the current incarnation of Ben Affleck cares about more.

And how long before Affleck has any reasonable chance of pulling himself out of this projected slump?

Probably about six years.

At which point I will welcome his second comeback with open arms.

Even at nearly 50, Affleck will surely have several more Hollywood lives left to live.

(Oh, Batman and Superman are in this also)

The spin doctors are hard at work on Batman v. Superman.

The massive financial hit and critical punching bag has had to be reimagined for its BluRay release like no massive financial hit before it. They'll say it's just because she's the only one who doesn't have a direct adversary, making her positioning in the picture otherwise problematic, but Wonder Woman has been thrust to the front and center of this movie in a vain effort to save it.

The studio heard what we all said: "Wonder Woman was the best part of it." A damning indictment indeed of a film featuring the two most iconic superheroes of all time, especially since the "best part" had about 13 minutes of screen time.

So why not remind us of it when we're strolling the aisles at Walmart?

Of course, the skin helps. As empowering as people may successfully argue this portrayal of Wonder Woman is, there's no doubt she's also a sex object. That outfit barely covers her. And the actress portraying her, Gal Gadot, came from the world of modeling.

If you want to credit Warner Brothers with a more benevolent form of pragmatism, it could just be forward thinking. After all, Wonder Woman's standalone movie is the next up in the DC universe (after Suicide Squad of course, but we've already been saturated with imagery of that).

And I've gotta say it worked. When I came across this image in the iTunes movie section, I thought, "There were some good parts of that movie after all."

Or one, at least.

That part of Batman v. Superman I really liked

Stipulated: Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is not a very good movie.

Everyone knows this. The critics know it. The filmmakers probably know it. The internet definitely knows it, the loud braying of a bunch of overexcited fanboys notwithstanding.

But there was one part of the movie I really liked. In fact, there was one part I thought was flipping awesome.

When I finally watched the movie on Wednesday night, nearly two weeks after it had been released here in Australia -- which, with all the memes and discussions it has generated, felt like an eternity -- I was really nervous during the first 15 minutes, because I realized it was possible I might love this movie.

Never would I have guessed that when a movie I heard was this bad went back into the events of another movie I didn't like, I would love it. But that's what the first 15-minute (or so) revisit of the climax of Man of Steel did for me.

I can't describe the epic chill I experienced from getting the street level, WTF-is-going-on view of that large alien ship drilling Metropolis like an oil rig, and the sounds that were emanating from it. Man of Steel was long enough ago, apparently, that I hadn't remembered the sounds that ship made, or its awesome appearance. But it's also very likely by the end of the running time of Man of Steel, I'd just had it with that movie, and the climax could never have had much of an impact on me -- other than worsening my already bad impression of the movie.

But at the beginning ... something about it just froze me in my tracks.

Enter Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), who unbeknownst to us was one of the little ants scurrying around on the Metropolis streets, being squashed by the big bugs of Krypton. This street view immediately becomes Bruce's view, and although he's anything but an average joe himself, his perspective functions as that of an average joe in this situation. It helps to have a specific pair of eyes through which to view these casually horrific events, which do indeed feel titanically horrific as depicted in Batman v. Superman.

They are "casually" horrific because the destruction isn't even the intention of any of the fighters, who include primarily Superman (Henry Cavill) and General Zod (Michael Shannon), but some other nameless Kryptonians as well. It's just collateral damage from using such outrageously strong biological weapons on each other -- and in this case, "biological" means "produced directly by their own alien biology." Sure, Zod et al are hellbent on destruction in a general sense in that they mean to colonize this planet for the survivors of Krypton, which also means shaping it into something entirely different than what it currently is. But they don't have a specific malice directed toward any of these people or buildings. They don't destroy merely out of a perversity of spirit.

Superman must, of course, use similar weapons to fight Zod et al, hence the beams that shoot out of his eyes slicing a building in half. Which is an astonishing thing to witness in this movie indeed.

But what's so singularly fascinating about this sequence is that you don't actually see Superman or Zod, or not in any real way. They are little powerful specks in the distance, and could be the size of Mighty Mouse for how small they seem. That something so small could cause so much damage is, well, the principle upon which all nuclear and chemical warfare is based.

But not seeing them is what really gives this scene its sense of powerful realism. The scene is not beholden to the ordinary narrative dictates that would require us to get close-ups of the faces of Superman and Zod ... dictates which, for obvious reasons, were in fact in place in Man of Steel. Without being privy to their faces, and therefore, without having some sense of their motivations, it all just seems like wanton destruction, chaos without meaning or end.

In short, the crumbling of these buildings, the loss of these lives, and the understandable horror on the face of a helpless Bruce Wayne knocked my socks off.

The rest of the movie? Well, you know.

Everybody does.

The prophecy I Am Legend foretold

Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice is being unleashed around the world right now, and boy do the reviews stink.

But for me, it feels also like the ultimate case of life imitating art, one that had been gestating for nearly a decade.

When I saw I Am Legend in 2007, I noted that one of the billboards hanging in post-apocalyptic New York was for an upcoming movie called Batman vs. Superman. Unaware of a narrative thread in the comics that brought these two titans in opposition to each other (but also fairly aware that this is the type of thing that does happen in the comics), I thought this poster served as a commentary that seems prescient given what has happened superhero movies since then. This was a full five years before The Avengers, yet even in 2007, some shrewd observer could foretell that our nascent superhero craze would have its ultimate realization in movies that contained not one spandex suit, but a whole heap of them. At the very least the film was envisioning a future project that Warner Brothers would likely actually greenlight, which definitely made I Am Legend look like it was giving us a glimpse of our actual future, making the idea of a plague that will wipe us all out by then all the more chilling.

I guess I Am Legend imagined a more immediate future, as the date in this poster seems to be sometime in 2010. It took Warner Brothers six years longer than that to actually do it, and change up the signage just enough so it wasn't the exact logo from the movie.

So now I am awash in the weirdness of seeing the actual arrival of something that always seemed like a speculative future. It's like how we will all feel when we see our first hoverboard in use. And not that one that Tony Hawk rode for like a minute at one inch off the ground, but a true, versatile hoverboard like in Back to the Future II. Or, more directly similarly, when we watch the Aquaman movie that was first parodied in Entourage -- a moment that will actually occur in 2018.

But this may very well be the most interesting thing about the actual Batman vs. Superman. You're supposed to withhold judgment until you can see any movie for itself, but you can also make educated predictions based on track records. And Zack Snyder's is trending very negatively. Watchmen was great in 2009, but since then it's been a downward decline with The Owls of Ga'Hoole, Sucker Punch and Man of Steel. The odds that Snyder would suddenly seem more inspired in another Superman movie were always fairly low.

But I will dutifully go to see it in the theater ... even if only because then it will be free for me, rather than costing me $3.50 for a rental.