James Gunn‘s Superman is about so much stuff — big jolts, goofing off, silliness, monsters, emptiness, jerking off, twists and turns, urban destruction, social media trashings, the basically rancid nature of Average Joes and Janes — that it’s not really about anything except sadism…sadism directed at David Corenswet‘s Man of Vulnerability, and sadism directed at the audience.
The damn thing runs 129 minutes, and at least 80% or 85% — call it 110 minutes — of this crazy-ass, scatterbrained, no-holds-barred exercise in aggressive, over-visualized and sound-slammed fuckyou-ism (comic-book geeks will be delighted but people with taste will be rolling in nausea)…this effing film is largely about Superman getting his ass whupped, and that makes it not just repetitive and tiresome but infuriating after the first 45 or so.
Note to a friend: “I realize that no major critic wants to shit on comic-book movies — light scolding is permitted, but no dumping on them — because hard pans of such films tend to make critics sound mean-spirited, old-fogeyish and out of touch. And I’m not saying Superman doesn’t have a diseased scheme of its own, a kind or cancer-ridden, audience-despising worldview, but how in the world could anyone give this thing a pass?”
While watching I was muttering to myself “this film is fucking evil” but if I actually write this — if I literally call it a Superman flick with a 666 tattoed on its neck — the HE commentariat will say I’m mean-spirited, old-fogeyish and out of touch.
As noted, it’s mostly about Corenswet getting the shit beat out of him….pounded, bloodied, gut-slammed, bone-crunched, Kryptonited, cancelled, jailed, all but killed, goaded, derided, doubted, made to scream and howl ad nauseum. It’s Gunn’s intention, obviously, to make Superman into a whiny little bitch…to show him suffering, wincing, screaming, weeping, moaning, wailing.
HE to Gunn in my fifth row seat: “Will you fucking ease up on this shit? There’s more to life than just suffering.”
Corenswet is beaten more savagely, continuously and relentlessly in this thing than Jim Caviezel was beaten and bloodied in Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ. And that’s saying something.
Who wants to watch a once-heroic, true-blue figure (i.e., heroic back in the old Chris Reeve era) get bashed and bruised and pounded over and over and over and over and over and over?
And how, in the opening scene, does Corenswet manage to get bruised and bloodied in the first place? How does that work exactly? Yeah, he’s “human” in a certain emotionally vulnerable sense, but he’s also Superman.
And what’s with Krypto the attack dog? Why is he even in this thing? Krypto the white poodle presumably arrived from Krypton along with the infant Superman, so that would make him 30 years old or a really old fart in dog years…roughly 136.
I would really hate to jump into the churning sizzling brainpan of James Gunn and splash around. The man has no discipline, no soul, no shrewdness, no sense of restraint……he’s so geeked up and CG-pretzel twisted that he’s become a kind of mad fiend or gila monster.
If by clapping my hands three times I could eradicate James Gunn-ism from the face of the earth and hurl it into an eternal flaming hellscape, I would clap my hands three times.
Superman deals so much story at such a whooshing, whizbang pace that I was choking on it. I was swatting at the plot turns like flies.
“I don’t give a shit about any of this,” I was muttering. “Fuck all these people, all these meta-folks with their bullshit costumes and whatnot. I don’t want or need this shit in my life. And I pretty much hated the main characters. If Rachel Brosnahan‘s Lois Lane had been killed, I wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow….fine! The only character I really didn’t want to see killed, Corenswet aside, was Edi Gathegi‘s Mister Terrific. I would haver been totally fine if Skyler Gisondo‘s Jimmy Olden has been killed…no sweat at all.”
The fact that Gisondo looks like a young Bruno Kirby (he has a cucumber-sized nose) makes the idea of Sara Sampaio‘s Eve Teschmacher having a crush on him seem ridiculous. Women who look like Sampaio never give guys with big honkers the time of day.
I would have been totally at peace if every last person in Metropolis had been drowned or burned or squashed to death. Okay, except for a pretty woman who is saved by Superman from being crushed by a falling building. I don’t know her name but she’s attractive.
Nathan Fillon‘s Green Lantern wears the worst, dumbest-looking blonde wig every worn by any actor in the history of motion pictures.
I recognized the played-Leonard-Bernstein guy in a cameo, of course; ditto Angela Sarafyan from Westworld.
