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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Entertainment
Martin Robinson

Superman review: James Gunn just killed the superhero film

Oh dear. What we have here is a Howard the Duck, a Hudson Hawk, a big budget stinker which feels like the end of superhero films, when it should have been the beginning of something new.

James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel were a revelation, even within the context of Marvel’s peak years. They had wit, effortless quirkiness and a daring devil-may-care attitude to the pretensions of the genre, and as such Gunn seemed to be a fine choice for Warner Bros. to be the co-executive overseer of the new DC Universe. After the moody places the last Superman arrived at, with Zack Snyder’s grim Man of Steel and grimmer Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, bringing in a bit of Guardians-style snarky subversion looked to be the perfect route out of Ever Increasing Darkness.

But sadly, what we have here is very little Guardians magic. None of the verve or anarchy, only the silliness. Superman is slight, nonsensical, and only sporadically funny.

Without the rigor of the Marvel system, Gunn has fluffed this one. He’s the writer as well as director, presumably with a level of control, so it’s truly surprising how much of a mess it is, with lazy plotting, weak characterisation and little in the way of spectacular action. The script’s only achievement is to strip away any notion of Superman’s formerly timeless appeal and make the character seem inconsequential.

The story, such as it is, begins with Superman already three years into his appearance on earth - branded a ‘metahuman’ among some other beings (confusingly, some of these are man-made, others are aliens, though we’re not quite sure where the aliens came from... but anyway, there’s people with powers knocking around, okay?) - and he’s already a hero and loved by the good people of earth. He’s also in a relationship with Lois Lane, who knows all about the Clark Kent/Superman issue. So that’s most of the interesting Superman stuff taken care of before its even begun.

However, he’s also in trouble. Unbeknownst to Superman (how?), he has an enemy in Lex Luthor, a tech bro billionaire driven by spite - a kind of Musk/Trump hybrid - who has a massive Luthor Corp tower in the centre of Metropolis and is in control of a bunch of metahumans, led by the Hammer of Boravia, who at the start of the film have pummeled Supe half to death; we first see him bloodied and beaten in the snow near the Fortress of Solitude.

Luthor wants Superman dead because he’s envious of his good looks and popularity (yes really). Oh, and he’s also pursuing a dastardly mission to stir up war in a faraway desert region, backing the militaristic power of Boravia against the smaller Jarhanpur, which Luthor wants to take as his own fiefdom. Remember how the Avengers films began to unpick the complexities of liberal interventionism vs US imperialism? All such nuance is stripped away here. Instead we have evil foreign types with tanks in a bad country trying to destroy child-like foreign types with pick axes in a good country. Before the film had started Superman had already intervened to help Jarhanpur. While we see media and government types questioning his intervention, his response, which is portrayed as a ‘good’ response, is that he just doesn’t want people to die. He only wants to save. Any big questions are not the point, the point is that Superman is nice.

Still, Luthor attempts to start a social media campaign against him (ooh, you nasty man), with the help of some trained monkeys in a pocket universe he has created (er, yep). But while Luthor is capable of such incredible feats, what he really wants is a little strip of land to rule on earth and for people to like him more than Superman. O-kay.

(Warner Bros./PA Wire)

The always excellent Nicholas Hoult can’t do much with this poorly written Luthor. But at least Luthor is not as poorly written as Superman himself.

David Corenswet reminds you of George Lazenby’s casting as James Bond; he looks the part, but brings little else. Not that this is Corenswet’s particular fault, he has very little to get his teeth into. Clark Kent is barely present, meaning there’s no chance for Corenswet to explore an alter ego persona (you can’t help but recall how brilliant Christopher Reeve was in making Clark a clumsy innocent, but he had scenes in which to explore that), and Superman is just a hell of a lot dimmer than we are used to. Merely a well-meaning jock type who doesn’t want anyone to die. Yet trite enough to also quite happily break off from a battle with a (never explained) floating jellyfish monster in the middle of the city, to have a cup of coffee and a light squabble with Lois.

Corenswet has a nice smile but his character is empty, a being who doesn’t believe in much, certainly not Truth, Justice and the American Way (and what that might mean now). He’s just a dude who, like, doesn’t want any other dudes to get hurt. He’s the Joey from Friends of superheroes, which could actually have worked as an approach if this were given full throttle: Super-bro! A stoner-ish college drop-out who thinks he’s “punk rock” and wants to scrap with aliens and kiss some chicks. Instead, this Superman is just so far behind the machinations of everyone else that he almost feels irrelevant.

He’s weak too. That opening - as we saw in the trailer - with Superman broken on a frozen tundra. It turns out this was caused by Luthor’s metahuman simply slamming him really quite hard into the ground. Superman is not some invincible god/Jesus figure here, he gets beaten up a lot. What happened to his Amazing feats? There’s very little in the way of impressive moves. Maybe not even Super-bro then. Just, bro.

The spectacular stuff is left to Krypto, Superman’s dog (the only reason why this has two stars not one). While bro is keen to protect humans, what he’s really most concerned with is protecting his dog, even as Metropolis is being torn apart. Mind you, Krypto is the most fully-formed character here, he really does embody the loveble/annoying characteristics of an actual dog, animals that are always keen but very rarely conscious of what is required of them in most situations. Much like Superman himself in this movie.

Krypto provides some comic moments but is also lazily used time and again to get Superman out of trouble when all else has failed. Four or five times he appears at the last second with the Get Out of Jail Free card.

(Warner Bros./PA Wire)

While Rachel Brosnahan was seemingly perfectly cast as Lois, the Mrs Maisel star ready bring some pizazz to smart cookie reported Lois, with the chops required for some screwball comedy repartee with Clark, she isn’t given much of a chance to do this. Rather she’s in girlfriend mode to Superman/Clark (frustratingly little is made of this dichotomy in terms of their relationship), and while she does interview Superman to raise concerns about his foreign land interventions, it’s framed as a relationship row as much as a journalist challenging his values.

While Lois is admittedly the only female human character who isn’t a boobs-out, dim-witted solipsistic phone-addicted girl-child (the title cards aren’t the only retro thing here), she is also far from the strong foil who is capable of saving the day on earthly terms. Oddly, she is never even put into peril, she’s just a commentator on the sidelines, and a mild one at that, not a cynic or a wit.

Other characters include the hateful Justice Gang, a knowingly rubbish Justice League, who are portrayed as a bunch of layabout preeners with corporate sponsorship. This may have seemed funny on paper, but they are too annoying to really zing, and while their leader, Green Lantern Guy Gardner has some nice lines, ultimately he just comes across as a moron with the worst hair in movie history. Mr Terrific (Edi Gathegi) is more bearable but Hawkgirl (Isabella Merced) is given nothing to do. It’s hard to care about these people.

Wendell Pierce (Bunk from The Wire!), again barely features as Daily Planet editor Perry White. He just hangs around in a few scenes.

The film plays out with these light characters fighting through endless sequences that lack any kind of internal cohesion. At one stage a black hole appears on earth to conveniently suck away a main bad guy, but then is never sealed up or mentioned again. A tiny dinosaur alien creature (presumably Luthor is nicking them from his pocket universe but who knows?) is unleashed on the city and grows within minutes to Godzilla proportions, but no-one gets hurt because they trap him in a pedestrianised zone. Superman’s lungs are filled with nano-bots to suffocate him but he manages fly into space with two bad guys hanging off him and survives, yet earlier on his robot maids (not as funny as you’d think) in the Fortress of Solitude had to repair life-threatening lung damage after that first battle; is he invincible or not? And without labouring the point, all the while Luthor is this mega-genius who wants to be loved like Superman more than he wants to rule the universe as he is clearly capable.

The stakes are kept low here, and the film tries to get through on filling the screen with stuff in the hope it works out.

It doesn’t.

Where does Superman go from here? And the wider new DC Universe? This isn’t a fresh start, more of a face plant into a new era. Could Krypto take over to turn the whole thing into super-dogs universe? That may be the only route.

Look, superhero films over the last 15 years or so - particularly the Marvel films - have succeeded by delving into issues of identity, socio-political concerns, military morality, and philosophical questions about life. Just like the comics did! On the big screen this level of intelligence brought about intense fascination and discussion by huge swathes of audiences. And they managed it while at the same time delivering good laughs and huge spectacle.

Of course in recent times, these films have drifted into pretension and became so intricate and convoluted that audience began to lose interest.

But Gunn has thrown out the baby with the bathwater. The pretension has gone, but so has any challenge. So why should we care?

This Superman is pure bubblegum, but doesn’t even really succeed on those terms either, it’s simply not funny or hyperactive enough. The only thing you take away from the film is a bewildered shrug. ‘What does it matter?’ the film says, ‘It’s all a goof-off, dude.’

And so we reach a dead end.

Superman is out now.

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