James Gunn's 'Superman' reboot is overstuffed with ideas

The multiplexes are lousy with superheroes. As is Metropolis, apparently. Writer-director James Gunn’s “Superman” — a hard reboot of the beleaguered DC Comics cinematic universe — is an attempt to restore the franchise to factory settings, starting from scratch with an all-new cast and crew. The film posits a world positively riddled with “metahumans,” where intergalactic creatures attack major cities on what seems to be a daily basis and third-tier superheroes like Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) save the planet while squabbling amongst themselves over trivial matters like team names. The battles barely interrupt their banter, as jaded, seen-it-all city folk walk around the wreckage without raising an eyebrow.

What can a kid from Krypton do to stand out when surrounded by so many of Earth’s mightiest heroes? That’s the pickle the new “Superman” finds itself in pop culture-wise as well, at a time when it feels like superhero fatigue has blossomed into full-blown malaise. After a 10-year run, the stentorian, heavy metal DC Universe that began with filmmaker Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel” finally collapsed in on itself during 2023’s Andy Muschietti-directed “The Flash,” ending the saga with box office ignominy and a great George Clooney joke. (I must here confess a soft spot for Snyder’s four-hour director’s cut of “Justice League” that premiered on HBO Max during the pandemic. A grandiloquent folly full of bold, expressionistic images, it played to Snyder’s strengths by engaging with Superman as more of an absent, aspirational idea than a character he actually had to write. The project was aided enormously by Ben Affleck, who may not have been a great Batman but was the all-time best Bruce Wayne.)

The over-lit, kid-friendly exuberance of Gunn’s “Superman” is a calculated 180-degree turn away from Snyder’s dark, Wagnerian bombast. There’s even a cute CGI dog who flies around and wears a cape. We meet Krypto in the opening scene, dragging his owner to safety after Supes has gotten his clock cleaned by a gigantic android hovering over Metropolis. The movie begins in medias res, firing off so much exposition on the run that a colleague sitting near me worried we were watching a sequel to a movie that he’d missed. The short version is that angry, tech-bro billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) is fomenting a war in two made-up Middle Eastern countries to try and get the world to turn on illegal alien Superman (David Corenswet) and banish him to a secret interdimensional private prison Luthor has constructed to house metahuman enemies and ex-girlfriends who say mean things about him on social media.

I get what Gunn was going for, starting the movie at a sprint. Nobody reads comics from the first issue onward — at least we didn’t used to — and “Superman” conjures the feeling of grabbing a title off the stands in the middle of its run, when characters occasionally pause for a panel or two to explain their whole deal to new readers while charging along with events already in progress. It’s a smart way to write a monthly comic book, but I’m not so sure it works for a feature-length film. There’s a firehose of convoluted sci-fi lore being blasted in the audience’s faces for pretty much the entire 129-minute running time. You spend the whole movie playing catch-up. Gunn overstuffs every scene with so many metahumans, side-quests, supporting characters and spinoff setups it becomes bloody exhausting, even for people who care about this kind of thing.

Lord knows the timing couldn’t be more right for a movie about a climate change refugee coming to Kansas and becoming the best of us while a rich jerk fuels a smear campaign to make the world afraid of him for no reason. (I did enjoy Lex being envisioned as a gamer, using a remote-controlled robot to fight Superman by shouting commands to a cadre of joystick jockeys. Even better is Luthor polluting the internet with anti-Superman rhetoric posted by an army of monkeys clacking away at keyboards. I’m sure people online will be completely normal about this.) But what’s missing from the parade of plotting is a clear throughline — a goal or something we can want to have happen so that the movie will be able to end. It’s just one thing after another, endless cans of worms.

At first, we’re trying to tackle the ethical questions of Superman unilaterally interfering in global conflicts. Gunn brushes up against Snyder’s obsession with the Kryptonian as a potential weapon of mass destruction. Can any country really afford to let a being this powerful roam free and unchecked? But then, perhaps remembering that we already covered this in “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” — one of the most miserable movies in recent memory — he drops it and moves on to a bombshell revisionist revelation about Superman’s heritage, couched in a distracting Bradley Cooper cameo. That one doesn’t last long, either. Gunn can’t maintain a consistent tone, with dumb doggie humor followed by a scene in which an innocent civilian is cruelly tortured and shot in the head. It’s also hard to buy the script’s proselytizing about kindness and goodwill amid so many mean-spirited jokes about Jimmy Olsen’s ex-girlfriend having ugly feet.

It's a little unfair when other actors try to play Superman because nobody will ever be as perfect as Christopher Reeve. Corenswet is so lumpy, sorely lacking Reeve’s otherworldly elegance and grace. There’s nothing gentle about him. He comes off like a lunkhead, perking up only for some combatively frisky early scenes with Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane. (Naturally, the movie contrives to keep them apart for the rest of the running time.) Still, he fares better than Hoult, who finds exactly one shouty, petulant gear for Luthor and grinds it into dust. The best performance in the picture comes from Edi Gathegi as the aforementioned Mr. Terrific, a hyperintelligent hacker with a persnickety lack of patience for his Earthly counterparts. He’s got a very specific comedic personality in a movie that’s otherwise all fuzzy archetypes and similar-sounding wisecracks.

Gunn came up in the kiddingly schlocky, low-budget exploitation world of Troma Entertainment before making his fortune with Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy. So it makes sense that his “Superman” is basically a “Guardians” movie in different costumes, with everyone being breezily nonchalant around garishly colored space creatures and indulging in occasional flights of po-faced sentimentality. But what works in the Marvel quip factory doesn’t mesh with the Man of Steel. There’s no awe in this “Superman,” no magnificence. It’s shot in a flat, plasticky, shallow focus that I found patently ugly, the cluttered images devoid of grandeur.

It's easy to mock the needy egos of aging stars like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, but look at how they’re photographed in “F1” and the “Mission: Impossible” movies, presented to us as deities on Earth in an endless array of iconic hero poses. By contrast, Gunn’s Superman is shot like an everyday schmo in tights and an uncomfortable-looking diaper. He might as well be wearing jeans. I suppose this is part of the movie’s business-as-usual approach, in which untold miracles and acts of destruction take place before the eyes of an indifferent public. Gunn loves going back to the gag of regular folks taking selfies or eating snacks while massive battles rage in the background. I’d wager that no film has ever featured a downtown kaiju attack that has less impact on the plot or its participants than this one.

To what end are all these cheap giggles and shrugs? They make the film feel chintzy and small. We go to movies like this to be transported. We want to believe that a man can fly, but “Superman” can barely believe in itself. If everyone at the Daily Planet is going to casually sit down and have a staff meeting while the city is reduced to rubble around them, I don’t see why we in the audience should be worried about them, either.

“Superman” is now in theaters.