Far from the triumphant return to form DC and Warner Bros hoped for, James Gunn’s ‘Superman’ is a generic, dull, overwritten disaster.
There are a handful of questions I ask myself after I’ve watched a movie. Perhaps the most important of these is whether I’d like to see it again.
Sometimes – though rarely — I enjoy a film so much that I know I’ll be back to the theater a second time before the theatrical run ends. This was the case with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Other times, I hop online to pre-order the 4K Blu-Ray, like I did after seeing the How To Train Your Dragon live-action remake recently, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.
The other question I ask is whether or not I’d recommend that my friends and family go see the movie in theaters or wait for it to come to streaming (unless it’s a streaming movie, obviously). In some cases, of course, I simply don’t recommend it at all. I’m sure you could map the various stages of my enjoyment and recommendation onto a star chart. One I’d see again gets 4 stars. One I pre-order to watch at home, 3.5 stars. One I suggest you wait to stream, 3 stars. Anything below that . . . well.
I really wanted to love James Gunn’s Superman but I won’t be going back to the theaters to see it again, and I won’t be pre-ordering the 4K Blu-Ray and I won’t tell any of my friends or family to go see it, and honestly I can’t even recommend that you wait for streaming. This is one that you can safely skip. Go watch the 1978 movie again instead. That nearly 50-year-old movie flies where this one limps along, unsure of what exactly it wants to be, what tone it should adopt, and why it even exists in the first place. It has its moments. It has some good laughs and fun action, but the more I think about it the more I’m genuinely baffled at how this came to pass, how Gunn and DC could so utterly drop the ball.
Gunn promised to fix this with Superman, the first in a wider reboot of the DC cinematic universe that would involve recasting all but Gunn’s favorites – like John Cena’s Peacemaker, who makes a brief cameo in Superman. But this is far from the triumph that DC needed to restore faith in the comic book movie. Rather than soar, Superman crashes and burns despite the best efforts of its sprawling cast.
Some spoilers ahead (though I won’t spoil major twists etc.)So Many Characters, So Little Time
Mostly, this is a problem with the writing. David Corenswet is excellent as a younger, less gritty Man Of Steel. I enjoyed Henry Cavill in the role, but was never among those fans who insisted he should return, that noone could ever replace him. At his best, Corenswet is exactly the gosh golly gee wiz American Superman of old, determined to protect innocents and save lives. I wish we’d gotten more of this and less of the brooding, hunched over, down-in-the-mouth Superman this movie insists upon at every turn. I’m also not convinced of his chemistry with Lois Lane, played with sturdy confidence and just enough pluck by Rachel Brosnahan. However good both these actors are in their roles, whatever sparks fly are as artificial as the overbearing CGI. (More on that in a minute).
Nicholas Hoult does his level best with the billionaire corporate supervillain, Lex Luthor, but the antagonist in this film plays more like an angry frat boy than a scheming mastermind. For all his scientific brilliance – he’s found a way to create a pocket universe to use as a combination research facility / secret prison for bloggers and ex-girlfriends / warehouse for his angry social media propaganda monkeys – Luthor has very little in the way of memorable moments or lines. He’s a classic mustache-twirling villain but lacks substance and gravitas. His super evil plan to annex half of a third-world country and create his own kingdom is goofy more than anything. And no, “It’s just a comic book movie” does not excuse how ludicrous his motivations are. Alas, Lex Luthor is as generic and forgettable as the rest of the film.
The rest of the cast is, well, massive. Bafflingly massive. There are so many characters in this movie we never get a chance to care about any of them. Outside of one good scene between Clark and Lois, almost every frame is constantly packed with characters, whether this is the (admittedly very funny) Justice Gang (Nathan Fillion’s Green Lantern, Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl and Edi Gathegi’s scene-stealing Mister Terrific) or Lex and his lackeys.
