For a movie that’s meant to represent the birth of a brand-new cinematic universe (the DCU), James Gunn’s slight and slaphappy take on “Superman” doesn’t feel much like the start of anything.
In part, that’s because this goofy twist on the Man of Steel has the good sense to eschew an origin story. Rather than retell how the last son of Krypton was evacuated from another galaxy as a newborn and raised by a pair of kindly farmers in Kansas, Gunn’s gospel begins three years after Clark Kent (a golly gosh darn wonderful David Corenswet) revealed his alter-ego to the masses, three weeks since Metropolis’ resident metahuman inserted himself into an international conflict, and three minutes since he got his ass kicked for the first time.
But, like so much of Gunn’s semi-charming overcorrection to the biblical seriousness of the Zack Snyder era, the decision to kick things off in medias res feels less motivated by our familiarity with the world’s most famous hero than by our detachment from all that he represents. We know his story, Gunn implies, but we’ve forgotten what it means. This “Superman” isn’t about starting over; it’s about retracing our footsteps to find a new path forward.
As desperate to make up for lost time as it is to define itself against its times, Gunn’s film races to reframe its namesake as a character whose god-like power runs a distant second to his very human vulnerability, and whose unwavering goodness often seems like the most alien thing about his presence on planet Earth. This slightly less swole Kal-El can still carry a skyscraper on his back and get brought to his knees by a hunk of exposed kryptonite, but his lack of cynicism is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness alike, and the purity of his convictions is deeply foreign to a world so malformed by ulterior motives. (Gunn’s “Superman” is less “Man of Steel” than “Paddington 2,” minus the tight plotting and the electric action sequences.)
It’s a world that Gunn trusts we’ll recognize despite the Saturday morning blitheness of its tone and the cheery nowheresville of its design (Metropolis is mostly played by a Cleveland shot to resemble a combination of Mayfield and Manhattan). This may be the zaniest superhero movie its director has made so far (Jonathan and Martha Kent are more cartoonish than the humanoid land shark who helped save the world in “The Suicide Squad”), but it’s also the most rooted in reality, and the constant tension between those two energies is often the only thing that keeps Gunn’s script from feeling like five different issues of “All-Star Superman” mixed together.
On the one hand, Superman is an undocumented immigrant who becomes a scapegoat for all America’s problems, and his nemesis — played by Nicholas Hoult, who transforms a dull villain role with a touch of the blinkered sociopathy he perfected on “The Great” — is a billionaire technocrat who doesn’t trust that anyone so powerful could ever be pure at heart, and publicly accuses Superman of “grooming us.” On the other hand, Lex Luthor creates an intra-dimensional pocket universe to jail his ex-girlfriends and manipulates public opinion with an army of enslaved monkeys who blast anti-Superman propaganda onto social media. (It should be funny how brainless the masses are in this movie, but Gunn’s irreverent streak runs dry whenever his “Superman” threatens to brush up against satire.)
One of the film’s interlaced but awkwardly layered plots finds a trio of corporate metahumans (“The Justice Gang”) fighting to contain an adorable baby kaiju as it stomps around Metropolis. Another of them hinges on a lopsided conflict between a cosmopolitan empire and its Middle Eastern neighbor, the former supplied with cutting-edge technology by interested parties, while the latter is in danger of being wiped off the map.
That would be a tricky balancing act for any blockbuster, but it’s that much harder to pull off — and that much harder to enjoy — in the context of a movie that’s trying to get a cinematic universe up on its feet. Determined to restore a lightness to Superman without dancing around how dark things have gotten in his absence, Gunn’s movie is too busy reacting to the world at hand to create one of its own. So fast, scattered, and overstuffed that it’s forced to rely on a manufactured sense of fun in lieu of natural momentum, “Superman” alludes to a wide range of ideas and emotions that it isn’t given the time to make real; it wastes the best ensemble these characters have ever known on a story that never figures out how seriously it should take them.
Indeed, the film would have been a bonafide disaster if not for the self-possessiveness of its cast, Rachel Brosnahan chief among them. Betraying her standards by dating a writer as bad as Clark Kent, and betraying her ethics by keeping his newsworthy secret to herself, Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane might hem and haw over what it means for Superman to intervene in global affairs. Her inner conflict, though, is all the more compelling in the face of her boyfriend’s refusal to second-guess himself. (Brosnahan only appears in a small handful of scenes for some reason, but every one of them pops with the chemistry missing from the rest of the superhero genre.)
For his part, Superman doesn’t have any trouble picking sides, and the fact that the biggest decision he makes in this movie takes place before the plot even starts allows Gunn to frame the actual narrative as less of a moral dilemma than a practical one. It also allows Gunn to pad the story with all sorts of popcorn-munching nonsense, including a team of unfeeling helper robots (funny!), a super-powered doggy who needs to be housebroken (cute!), and a shapeshifting prisoner named Metamorpho (green!).
Most of these elements are fitfully amusing on their own, but in a film where Lois Lane only gets a few minutes of meaningful screentime and Superman is afforded less of an emotional foundation than Star-Lord ever got, it’s hard not to get antsy when a Justice Gang member suddenly becomes the main character for a while. Edi Gathegi is great-and-a-half as Mr. Terrific, but I’d rather see that character lead his own movie than watch him walk away with this one. By the same token, the eye-rolling flirtation between scrappy reporter Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) and über-ditz Eve Teschmacher (Sara Sampaio) might have worked better in a film less determined to look for the best in people.
It’s no coincidence that the best scene in this extremely ridiculous film — by far — is also its most grounded. It arrives early on, as Lois challenges her boyfriend to a no-holds-barred interview about his role as an international peacemaker. The friction that bristles between the journalist’s pragmatism and the superhero’s guilelessness is matched by the electricity that sparks between the two actors playing them; Corenswet is never stronger than when his Kal-El cracks at the seams, while Brosnahan channels the same whip-smart, love-drunk brilliance that Holly Hunter brought to “Broadcast News,” but here in a role that requires her to act like she’s dating Albert Brooks and William Hurt all at once. Sharp, tetchy, and exasperated in how it interrogates what kindness might even look like in a world that’s become so cruel to itself, this is the only memorable fight scene in a $225 million action movie that never quite figures out how to make a spectacle of Superman’s humanity.
As a symptom of the movie’s reactive nature, Superman doesn’t really do anything, and most of Gunn’s efforts to dramatize the duality of the character’s existence made me wish that he did even less (a third-act reveal forced me to suppress a spontaneous groan). The beat where he saves a squirrel from being crushed to death almost seems like self-commentary, and the setpiece accompanied by the sunshine groove of Noah and the Whale’s “5 Years Time” falls so far short of Gunn’s usual needle-drops that it feels ghost-directed by Shawn Levy.
Nothing in “Deadpool & Wolverine” can match the magic that “Superman” achieves in the rare moments when it’s focused on what matters, but I have to admit it does a much better job of balancing silliness with sincerity. Very few superhero directors are better than Gunn at threading that needle, but here — in a movie so freighted with its own importance, a movie that strains to be more fun and more galvanizing than any he’s made before — his contradictory ambitions can’t help but get knotted together.
Of course, the real problem is that those ambitions feel so contradictory in the first place, and that they continue to cancel each other out across a story that hinges on positioning Clark’s humanity as the ultimate source of his strength. We love Superman not because he’s good, or because he’s powerful, but rather because he’s good in spite of being powerful. Because he’s awkward and goofy for a square-jawed god, and a shitty writer for someone capable of landing a story on the front page of Metropolis’ biggest newspaper. Because he wasn’t born any better than the rest of us, but the light of our sun makes him strong enough to choose kindness even when Lex Luthor gives him every reason to embrace cynicism.
Gunn is right to recognize that a certain amount of silliness is key to Superman’s charm, but here it mostly just distracts from the seriousness of what’s at stake. It’s hard to make a comic book come to life at the same time as you’re trying to bring life into a comic book, just as it’s hard not to admire Gunn for trying. But it’s even harder to care if a man can fly when there isn’t any gravity to the world around him.
Grade: C+
“Superman” opens from Warner Bros. Pictures on Friday, July 11.
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