‘Superman’ Review: James Gunn’s Reboot Is A Painfully Mediocre, Super Generic Mess Of A Movie

InnovationGaming‘Superman’ Review: James Gunn’s Reboot Is A Painfully Mediocre, Super Generic Mess Of A MovieByErik Kain, Senior Contributor

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Perhaps the most important of these is whether I’d 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, I did after seeing the How To Train Your Dragon -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 ing (unless it’s a ing 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, 3

One I suggest you wait to, 3 stars

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 ing

This is one that you can safely skip

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 some good laughs and fun action, but the more I think it the more I’m genuinely baffled at how this came to pass, how Gunn and DC could so utterly drop the ball

I wanted to love Superman despite being concerned after every single new trailer released for the flagship DCU film

This was hailed as a return to form for DC after years of mediocrity

The Synderverse experiment had gone badly and DC and Warner Bros have struggled ever since to cobble together a cohesive cinematic universe to rival the MCU

Even as Marvel’s cinematic oeuvre slid into increasing irrelevance, DC floundered

Only the rare non-DCEU effort seemed to stick the landing: The first Joker film, Matt Reeves’s The Batman, the stellar HBO series The Penguin

Notably, all Gotham-flavored jects

Elsewhere, outside of reasonably decent efforts the first Wonder Woman or Peacemaker, we were treated mostly to an incoherent mess, from The Flash to Black Adam

One box-office disappointment after another

So much money spent on everything but a good script

Gunn mised 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 – 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

MORE FOR YOU Some spoilers ahead (though I won’t spoil major twists etc. ) So Many Characters, So Little Time Mostly, this is a blem 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 tect innocents and s

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)

For all his scientific brilliance – he’s found a way to create a pocket universe to use as a combination re facility / secret prison for bloggers and ex-girlfriends / warehouse for his angry social media paganda 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

There are so many characters in this movie we never get a chance to care 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

Superman is overstuffed, both in terms of cast and plot. (The Justice Gang feels troublingly similar to Black Adam’s Justice Society Of America also, and honestly it’s even more troubling how similar the two movies are)

Mister Terrific was a very fun character, though bably the entire Justice Gang should have been d for a different movie

Same goes for Superman’s cousin, Supergirl, who bably should have been left to a post-credits scene

Many of these characters are either underutilized – Wendell Pierce’s Perry White basically chews on a cigar, that’s his character – or weirdly mischaracterized

Ma and Pa Kent are the most stereotypical country bumpkins imaginable

Worse, Lex’s girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher (Sara Sampaio) is a ditzy blond straight out of an 80s’ movie

Her “relationship” with Clark and Lois’s colleague Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) is frankly bizarre, and mostly left unexplained in the film

But she’s ultimately responsible for the key information that leads to Lex’s downfall, so why portray her as such a stereotypical (and wildly dated) dumb blond

I did Krypto the dog, however

I really d Krypto a lot

Perhaps the best line in the movie is Clark telling Lois “He isn’t even a very good dog but he’s out there alone and scared

I have to find him. ” It was the one moment I felt anything at all during the film, at least any kind of real emotion

Maybe this should have just been Krypto & Superman, a movie Supe and his puppy

I’d watch that movie again

Lex LuthorCredit: Warner Bros A Totally Generic Superhero Movie The overstuffed cast finds itself in an equally overstuffed, badly-paced plot

We begin, in media res, three years after Superman has made his true nature known to the world, three weeks after he’s stopped a war between a powerful Eastern European nation and its weak Middle-Eastern neighbor – a war we later learn was aided and abetted by Luthorcorp

The movie picks up three minutes after Superman lost his first fight, and we learn quickly that it was Lex’s mysteriously masked goon, Ultraman, who gave him the beating – largely thanks to an incredibly gimmicky strategy where Lex s Ultraman the “moves” he needs to use to beat Superman at his own game (a gimmick that returns in the final act, leading to an incredibly silly fight scene between the two metahumans)

I have mixed feelings skipping the origin story

From here, the movie only stops once or twice to take a breath

The story moves from one action sequence to the next, racing forward at a breakneck pace that leaves little room for character development

Lois Lane gets a few scenes, but she’s quickly overshadowed by Mister Terrific

Superman is lost in the shuffle, less a hero with agency forced to make hard choices and more of a reactive force, hurtling between one crisis and the next

The one time he’s presented with a hard choice of any kind, he’s able to easily hand off his savior duties to the Justice Gang

The movie falls into so many superhero genre traps it almost plays accidental parody

Everything is chaos, but also too neat and tidy

There’s a major calamity that threatens to end the world in the third act, but of course, as with all conflicts of this type, we know the world will not end, so there’s very little tension or suspense

It’s a foregone conclusion that Superman will stop Lex and the day, and even if that’s always going to be the case with Superman, making the stakes so impossibly huge ultimately makes them feel no stakes at all

Smaller, more intimate and personal conflicts always work better for this very reason

The structure of the plot falls into a narrative trap we see in all s of movies

Events happen and then other events happen

The movie moves from one event to the next not because there are consequences, but because that’s what Gunn needs to have happen to get from point A to point B

When a story gresses because characters make choices that lead to consequences that lead to conflict that lead to more choices that lead to more consequences, we end up caring the characters and what they do a lot more

We become invested. (Matt Stone and Trey Parker note that the most important thing you can do in script-writing is avoid “and then” between beats

What should happen instead, between every single beat, is either the word ‘therefore’ or ‘but’

In Superman, every beat is connected by “and then” resulting in very little sense of causality or consequence whatsoever)

Meanwhile, events constantly transpire that feel forced and unrealistic

When the Daily Planet crew finds real dirt on Lex, they publish the damning article from Mister Terrific’s flying saucer as they escape a collapsing Metropolis

The news breaks everywhere almost instantly, despite world events the total destruction of Metropolis and the outbreak of a new war also taking place at the exact same time

Perhaps I’m overly familiar with how news cycles work, but you only publish a story this during the destruction of one of the largest cities in the country if you want to bury it, not if you want the truth out there

And perhaps I’m too familiar with the power of oligarchs, but I don’t see a news article leading to the downfall of Lex Luthor

I just see him spinning it as fake news, lawyering up and getting out of jail free, with his army of monkeys working overtime to change public perception

The Justice GangCredit: Warner Bros A Tonal Disaster Of course, you might think this means that Superman is just an example of poptimism the way the Man Of Steel always has been

But Gunn not only overcorrects when it comes to redirecting the dark and gritty Synderverse, he can’t seem to settle on a tone

If this is an upbeat Superman movie, why does it feel so grim and cynical still

If anything, the optimism of Corenswet’s Clark Kent feels wedged into the plot in spite of itself

Most of the time, Superman is depressed or angry or getting beat to a pulp or having cans thrown at him or getting arrested

We learn that his biological parents on Krypton weren’t actually good at all

They were basically just Viltrumites (the Krypton- alien species from the excellent Prime series and graphic novels, Invincible) who sent their son to Earth not tect its people, but to rule and dominate them

He’s supposed to “take as many wives as possible” to spread his superior genes

This leads to a running “secret harem” joke that falls pretty flat

The weirdly cynical nature of the movie stands in stark contrast to its purported optimism and the incessant jokiness only makes matters worse

Sure, it has lots of funny moments, but the humor is all wrong for Superman

I loved Guardians of the Galaxy, but where constant snark and Gunn’s sense of humor work so well with Star-Lord and his crew, it feels wildly out-of-place in a Superman movie

Tonally, this movie is all over the place

The fact that you never really get to care any of these characters the way you did for Rocket or Groot or Gamora or Drax doesn’t help matters

None of this feels Superman

Superman never feels special

You could replace him with any number of other superheroes in this movie and it would work the same

Whatever attempts to make this “alien” a stand-in for immigrants ultimately fall flat, a political message inserted without any conviction whatsoever

There is little in the way of conviction here at all

An Assault On The Eyes Indeed, the only thing Gunn seems committed to in Superman is the oversaturated aesthetic

While some of the action scenes are fun and well-choreographed, I found the overall look of the film distracting

I’m glad that it’s colorful, but it has that cheap, plasticky “this is a commercial” color pallette that I find incredibly jarring

There are too many dizzying, wide-angle shots

The CGI is aggressive and overused

Some scenes, a fight that takes place in an antiton river in the pocket universe, feel almost more a cartoon than -action, and not in a good way

I think I would have enjoyed just having it in the trailers and getting a totally original score for this movie

The needle-drops were pretty mixed as well, especially compared to Gunn’s past films, though I did really the closing song, “Punkrocker” by The Teadybears featuring Iggy Pop

That’ll be in my head for days

Between the overwritten plot, the sprawling cast, the neat-and-tidy resolution to the conflict and the glaring visuals, this is a Superman reboot that screams generic superhero movie at the top of its lungs

DC needed a Superman that could truly soar and instead we got a predictable, run-of-the-mill, weirdly pedestrian movie that’s mostly just painfully mediocre

James Gunn’s fingers are all over this one, and I think that’s the biggest blem

We needed a more straight-laced director to help Superman soar, and a script that tapped more earnestly into its universal themes of goodness and heroism, rather than just another superhero movie riddled with half-baked one-liners and the same-old same-old plot we’ve come to expect from the genre

What a crushing disappointment

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