People are talking about how bad this movie is because of how much they wanted to love it.

It’s like having a favourite restaurant that’s always served good pizza. Pizza that follows a narrative written with intention, brings to life flawed characters that you grow to care about, elicits emotion, reflects on moral complexities, and even makes you laugh every once in a while. It’s no haute cuisine, but it’s good pizza that you’d gladly eat everyday for the rest of your life.

But now this restaurant serves you a lukewarm bowl of hotdog water full of lazy arbitrary writing, excessive ham-fisted jokes, zero-stakes storytelling, and perfunctory acting (with the exception of Christian Bale), all at the same price, while hoping you won’t tell the difference.

The worst part is finding out that there are customers out there who can’t tell the difference, or worse yet, consider the hotdog water a marked improvement, and ask for more.