Superman (2025)

Watched 7/17/25 (theater)

This Superman is a tough project to assign a rating to. So much more energetic, so much more colorful, so much more MOVIE than much of the other Hollywood fare we’ve had this year. James Gunn’s franchise-starter is well-cast, boasts good special effects (for the most part), and benefits from a mission accomplished of never slowing down. That last point may be a boon to younger viewers, in particular. I have to say, however, I was just shellshocked by the end of it—unsure of exactly what to latch onto in the big ole mess, and more than sure that a lot of the half-assed attempts at sentiment and the overplayed attempts at humor fell flat. It’s a hard movie to hate. You can tell there’s a lot of affection for the character in the direction, especially. But this script, and crucially its tone or lack thereof, is just absolutely all over the place.

The beating heart of this movie, without a doubt, is Superman himself, David Corenswet. With the surname of a country boy and the looks of a movie star, he fits the role of man of steel to a tee. The empathy machine he is here channels some of the best parts of early Christopher Reeve heroics, and with modern technology we get to see this Superman punished again and again for his good deeds and optimism. In fact, that's where our story begins; right in the middle of the action. Superman has just had his ass handed to him. We establish his Fortress of Solitude, an exceptionally cool lair that has the unfortunate purpose of removing any and all stakes from the film as we watch it heal our hero within minutes. Despite all of the goodwill that this movie works really hard at building up with Corenswet's undying effort, the "undying" is also a large problem introduced from the jump.

So Superman heals up and goes back to Metropolis, where he (rarely) works as a reporter while moonlighting (sunlighting) as a vigilante. He gets beat up again by this Hammer of Boravia fellow, which of course triggers a vicious news cycle trying to cancel Superman, and we're off. This is a movie that somewhat challengingly decides to feature cancellation and journalistic integrity front and center. That's all good and fine, and completely without subtlety, but the bigger problem is how it chooses to wrap up those arcs later on.

Right on the tip of the iceberg of various Superman-adjacent news scandals are Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, played brilliantly and somewhat ham-handedly by Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult, respectively. While all three have no shortage of eye-catching ability, Brosnahan and Corenswet's scenes in particular bristle with chemistry. The couple has been dating for three months and already it's love--you can feel it in the air. The actors do a good job here. It's too bad they only have three or four short scenes together. And then Corenswet and Hoult, while we're told (via too much yelling for my taste) Superman the alien is the mortal enemy of Luthor the human genius, that's all that's ever done. We're told. There's an old rule in movies that you should show, not tell, as much as possible, but the central love/hate triangle in this adaptation of the comic series is underdeveloped and tries to rescue itself by Hoult in particular just dumping expositionary hate-speak that leaves absolutely nothing under the surface. In a better script, the pace would not be so breakneck as to warrant this dumping, sprinkling in backstory and motivations more naturally to clue us in on Luthor's antagonism.

The pacing in this movie is like lightning. Again, it's never a boring movie...well, except when it dives into world-ending punchouts for like the first, last, and middle 20 minutes of the movie...which is a whole hour I guess...but it just has way too much going on. As previously noted, after a perfectly sweet and honestly somewhat fascinating setup of Clark Kent and Lois Lane's tumultuous relationship, we get to meet the whole gang. There are Superman's blood-parent holograms and his robots and his dog (a lot of dog stuff in this movie--some would say too much). There's of course Luthor, who has a whole cabal of annoying computer nerds who treat fighting Superman like a video game. There are the employees of The Daily Planet: a nameless dude who is mean to Clark Kent once, a lovesick woman with big boobs who has like three speaking lines, Jimmy Olsen who gets a lot of girls as his defining characteristic, and the editor guy whose name escapes me because he also has nothing to do. Then there are Ultraman and The Engineer, more bad guys...and boy, is this Engineer a cheeseball of an actor. Then there's the weird Godzilla monster, and the Justice Gang (I actually really enjoyed Nathan Fillion), and this Element Guy who kryptonites Superman, and this sandwich shop guy who gets killed after a few speaking lines and is meant to be, but is not, impactful. It's way too much.

The script's aimlessness and overstuffed nature are matched only by its refusal to pick a tone. It vacillates well between humor and heart in its first Lois/Clark scene, an interview-gone-wrong that, like I said, gave me some serious hope for the rest of the movie. Then it spends way too much time with its other characters and subplots. Then Lex Luthor kills someone with a revolver out of nowhere, in a movie that literally only kills one human and one monster in its entire runtime. Of course that revolver scene, which is meant to emotionally affect both Superman and the audience, is awkwardly cushioned by a dog-humor-filled black hole setpiece that just looks like CG vomit, some extremely rushed Ma and Pa Kent stuff that needed way more development to justify the sentimentality it reaches for (I actually really liked those actors and that farm--wish we had gotten more of the movie with that stuff), and strange politics and social media mumbo jumbo.

When it finally reaches the third act, this movie is just brimming with offputting conclusions. The big political scandal at the heart of the movie, meant to mirror Israel/Palestine, is wrapped up by a character named Hawkgirl, who has two minutes of screentime, tops, murdering the president of one of the countries in cold blood and played for laughs with an Alka-Seltzer gag. What am I supposed to take away from that?? There's a league of monkeys typing anti-Superman rhetoric into Twitter to trick the Earth into hating its mightiest hero—that is eventually revealed to the world to save Sup’s image. There's a moment where it’s revealed that Superman's dad, played by Bradley Cooper in a random-ass cameo, wanted him to enslave Earth and have a ton of sex? The second most screentime in the movie goes to Mr. Terrific, a fun Yondu-of-Guardians knockoff who is the tech guy that can deal with the annoying world-ending black hole threat at the end of the movie. It's overwhelming, especially when capped off by a really on-the-nose speech by Superman of what it means to be human. Subtext is not one of James Gunn's key interests, but I wish it were. I also wish he could pick a message because winning Twitter wars through sexy selfies and murdering world leaders without any democratic decision seem like odd endings to these arcs, if they can be called arcs at all.

Again, Corenswet does a bang-up job. He is wholly believable, and easy to root for before he gives that annoying speech at the end. The guy really sells getting his ass kicked, which has historically been a problem for Superman and one that makes him hard to identify with. Here, the problem is that he has a good, well-acted, hot love interest whom he barely gets to interact with, and he's left punching people out to a lackluster rehash of the Williams score and crippled emotional beats that left me more chilly than the Fortress of Solitude. I found myself appreciating Corenswet and Brosnahan throughout the runtime of this Superman, but not much else is going to stick with me here. At least it wasn't boring.

A very watchable, very peculiar 4.5/10