In Wrath of Khan, we have a villain who's pretty believable. We actually feel sympathy for Khan. In Into Darkness, we have a Khan who (although played brilliantly) is an obvious "bad guy" from the start, and the only item of sympathy we have for him--that he misses his crew--is wiped away when Spock reveals that they're all genocidal maniacs.

The best parts of the film were the homages, I think. Everything else felt empty. If you changed the names, it would have been a fairly ho-hum science fiction movie. It's really just riding on the coattails of better films at this point. It's becoming increasingly obvious that Abrams is too shallow to direct Star Trek films. There's no attempt at exploring what it means to be human, which even lackluster Star Trek films like Nemesis tried to do. It's just explosions and needless undressing.