James Gunn’s Man Of Steel Is A Painfully Mediocre, Super Generic Mess Of A Movie

There are a handful of questions I ask myself after I’ve watched a movie. Perhaps the most important of these is whether I’d like to see it again.

Sometimes – though rarely — I enjoy a film so much that I know I’ll be back to the theater a second time before the theatrical run ends. This was the case with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Other times, I hop online to pre-order the 4K Blu-Ray, like I did after seeing the How To Train Your Dragon live-action remake recently, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.

The other question I ask is whether or not I’d recommend that my friends and family go see the movie in theaters or wait for it to come to streaming (unless it’s a streaming movie, obviously). In some cases, of course, I simply don’t recommend it at all. I’m sure you could map the various stages of my enjoyment and recommendation onto a star chart. One I’d see again gets 4 stars. One I pre-order to watch at home, 3.5 stars. One I suggest you wait to stream, 3 stars. Anything below that . . . well.

I really wanted to love James Gunn’s Superman but I won’t be going back to the theaters to see it again, and I won’t be pre-ordering the 4K Blu-Ray and I won’t tell any of my friends or family to go see it, and honestly I can’t even recommend that you wait for streaming. This is one that you can safely skip. Go watch the 1978 movie again instead. That nearly 50-year-old movie flies where this one limps along, unsure of what exactly it wants to be, what tone it should adopt, and why it even exists in the first place. It has its moments. It has some good laughs and fun action, but the more I think about it the more I’m genuinely baffled at how this came to pass, how Gunn and DC could so utterly drop the ball.

I wanted to love Superman despite being concerned after every single new trailer released for the flagship DCU film. This was hailed as a return to form for DC after years of mediocrity. The Synderverse experiment had gone badly and DC and Warner Bros have struggled ever since to cobble together a cohesive cinematic universe to rival the MCU. Even as Marvel’s cinematic oeuvre slid into increasing irrelevance, DC floundered. Only the rare non-DCEU effort seemed to stick the landing: The first Joker film, Matt Reeves’s The Batman, the stellar HBO series The Penguin. Notably, all Gotham-flavored projects. Elsewhere, outside of reasonably decent efforts like the first Wonder Woman or Peacemaker, we were treated mostly to an incoherent mess, from The Flash to Black Adam. One box-office disappointment after another. So much money spent on everything but a good script.

Gunn promised to fix this with Superman, the first in a wider reboot of the DC cinematic universe that would involve recasting all but Gunn’s favorites – like John Cena’s Peacemaker, who makes a brief cameo in Superman. But this is far from the triumph that DC needed to restore faith in the comic book movie. Rather than soar, Superman crashes and burns despite the best efforts of its sprawling cast.

Some spoilers ahead (though I won’t spoil major twists etc.)

So Many Characters, So Little Time

Mostly, this is a problem with the writing. David Corenswet is excellent as a younger, less gritty Man Of Steel. I enjoyed Henry Cavill in the role, but was never among those fans who insisted he should return, that noone could ever replace him. At his best, Corenswet is exactly the gosh golly gee wiz American Superman of old, determined to protect innocents and save lives. I wish we’d gotten more of this and less of the brooding, hunched over, down-in-the-mouth Superman this movie insists upon at every turn. I’m also not convinced of his chemistry with Lois Lane, played with sturdy confidence and just enough pluck by Rachel Brosnahan. However good both these actors are in their roles, whatever sparks fly are as artificial as the overbearing CGI. (More on that in a minute).

Nicholas Hoult does his level best with the billionaire corporate supervillain, Lex Luthor, but the antagonist in this film plays more like an angry frat boy than a scheming mastermind. For all his scientific brilliance – he’s found a way to create a pocket universe to use as a combination research facility / secret prison for bloggers and ex-girlfriends / warehouse for his angry social media propaganda monkeys – Luthor has very little in the way of memorable moments or lines. He’s a classic mustache-twirling villain but lacks substance and gravitas. His super evil plan to annex half of a third-world country and create his own kingdom is goofy more than anything. And no, “It’s just a comic book movie” does not excuse how ludicrous his motivations are. Alas, Lex Luthor is as generic and forgettable as the rest of the film.

The rest of the cast is, well, massive. Bafflingly massive. There are so many characters in this movie we never get a chance to care about any of them. Outside of one good scene between Clark and Lois, almost every frame is constantly packed with characters, whether this is the (admittedly very funny) Justice Gang (Nathan Fillion’s Green Lantern, Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl and Edi Gathegi’s scene-stealing Mister Terrific) or Lex and his lackeys. Superman is overstuffed, both in terms of cast and plot. (The Justice Gang feels troublingly similar to Black Adam’s Justice Society Of America also, and honestly it’s even more troubling how similar the two movies are). Mister Terrific was a very fun character, though probably the entire Justice Gang should have been saved for a different movie. Same goes for Superman’s cousin, Supergirl, who probably should have been left to a post-credits scene.

Many of these characters are either underutilized – Wendell Pierce’s Perry White basically chews on a cigar, that’s his character – or weirdly mischaracterized. Ma and Pa Kent are the most stereotypical country bumpkins imaginable. Worse, Lex’s girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher (Sara Sampaio) is a ditzy blond straight out of an 80s’ movie. It’s shocking to see a woman portrayed this way in 2025, and I’m not one to usually get too ruffled over these things. Her “relationship” with Clark and Lois’s colleague Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) is frankly bizarre, and mostly left unexplained in the film. But she’s ultimately responsible for the key information that leads to Lex’s downfall, so why portray her as such a stereotypical (and wildly dated) dumb blond?

I did like Krypto the dog, however. I really liked Krypto a lot. Perhaps the best line in the movie is Clark telling Lois “He isn’t even a very good dog but he’s out there alone and scared. I have to find him.” It was the one moment I felt anything at all during the film, at least any kind of real emotion. Maybe this should have just been Krypto & Superman, a movie about Supe and his puppy. I’d watch that movie again.

A Totally Generic Superhero Movie

The overstuffed cast finds itself in an equally overstuffed, badly-paced plot. We begin, in media res, three years after Superman has made his true nature known to the world, three weeks after he’s stopped a war between a powerful Eastern European nation and its weak Middle-Eastern neighbor – a war we later learn was aided and abetted by Luthorcorp. The movie picks up three minutes after Superman lost his first fight, and we learn quickly that it was Lex’s mysteriously masked goon, Ultraman, who gave him the beating – largely thanks to an incredibly gimmicky strategy where Lex feeds Ultraman the “moves” he needs to use to beat Superman at his own game (a gimmick that returns in the final act, leading to an incredibly silly fight scene between the two metahumans). I have mixed feelings about skipping the origin story.

From here, the movie only stops once or twice to take a breath. The story moves from one action sequence to the next, racing forward at a breakneck pace that leaves little room for character development. Lois Lane gets a few scenes, but she’s quickly overshadowed by Mister Terrific. Superman is lost in the shuffle, less a hero with agency forced to make hard choices and more of a reactive force, hurtling between one crisis and the next. The one time he’s presented with a hard choice of any kind, he’s able to easily hand off his savior duties to the Justice Gang.

The movie falls into so many superhero genre traps it almost plays like accidental parody. Everything is chaos, but also too neat and tidy. There’s a major calamity that threatens to end the world in the third act, but of course, as with all conflicts of this type, we know the world will not end, so there’s very little tension or suspense. It’s a foregone conclusion that Superman will stop Lex and save the day, and even if that’s always going to be the case with Superman, making the stakes so impossibly huge ultimately makes them feel like no stakes at all. Smaller, more intimate and personal conflicts always work better for this very reason.

The structure of the plot falls into a narrative trap we see in all sorts of movies. Events happen and then other events happen. The movie moves from one event to the next not because there are consequences, but because that’s what Gunn needs to have happen to get from point A to point B. When a story progresses because characters make choices that lead to consequences that lead to conflict that lead to more choices that lead to more consequences, we end up caring about the characters and what they do a lot more. We become invested. (Matt Stone and Trey Parker note that the most important thing you can do in script-writing is avoid “and then” between beats. What should happen instead, between every single beat, is either the word ‘therefore’ or ‘but’. In Superman, every beat is connected by “and then” resulting in very sense of causality or consequence whatsoever).

Meanwhile, events constantly transpire that feel forced and unrealistic. When the Daily Planet crew finds real dirt on Lex, they publish the damning article from Mister Terrific’s flying saucer as they escape a collapsing Metropolis. The news breaks everywhere almost instantly, despite world events like the total destruction of Metropolis and the outbreak of a new war also taking place at the exact same time. Perhaps I’m overly familiar with how news cycles work, but you only publish a story like this during the destruction of one of the largest cities in the country if you want to bury it, not if you want the truth out there. And perhaps I’m too familiar with the power of oligarchs, but I don’t see a news article leading to the downfall of Lex Luthor. I just see him spinning it as fake news, lawyering up and getting out of jail free, with his army of monkeys working overtime to change public perception.

A Tonal Disaster

Of course, you might think this means that Superman is just an example of poptimism the way the Man Of Steel always has been. But Gunn not only overcorrects when it comes to redirecting the dark and gritty Synderverse, he can’t seem to settle on a tone. If this is an upbeat Superman movie, why does it feel so grim and cynical still?

If anything, the optimism of Corenswet’s Clark Kent feels wedged into the plot in spite of itself. Most of the time, Superman is depressed or angry or getting beat to a pulp or having cans thrown at him or getting arrested. We learn that his biological parents on Krypton weren’t actually good at all. They were basically just Viltrumites (the Krypton-like alien species from the excellent Prime Video series and graphic novels, Invincible) who sent their son to Earth not protect its people, but to rule and dominate them. He’s supposed to “take as many wives as possible” to spread his superior genes. This leads to a running “secret harem” joke that falls pretty flat.

The weirdly cynical nature of the movie stands in stark contrast to its purported optimism and the incessant jokiness only makes matters worse. Sure, it has lots of funny moments, but the humor is all wrong for Superman. I loved Guardians of the Galaxy, but where constant snark and Gunn’s sense of humor work so well with Star-Lord and his crew, it feels wildly out-of-place in a Superman movie. Tonally, this movie is all over the place. The fact that you never really get to care about any of these characters the way you did for Rocket or Groot or Gamora or Drax doesn’t help matters.

None of this feels like Superman. Superman never feels special. You could replace him with any number of other superheroes in this movie and it would work about the same. Whatever attempts to make this “alien” a stand-in for immigrants ultimately fall flat, a political message inserted without any conviction whatsoever. There is little in the way of conviction here at all.

An Assault On The Eyes

Indeed, the only thing Gunn seems committed to in Superman is the oversaturated aesthetic. While some of the action scenes are fun and well-choreographed, I found the overall look of the film distracting. I’m glad that it’s colorful, but it has that cheap, plasticky “this is a commercial” color pallette that I find incredibly jarring. There are too many dizzying, wide-angle shots. The CGI is aggressive and overused. Some scenes, like a fight that takes place in an antiproton river in the pocket universe, feel almost more like a cartoon than live-action, and not in a good way.

Reusing the John Williams music from Richard Donner’s 1978 film felt a little hokey as well. I think I would have enjoyed just having it in the trailers and getting a totally original score for this movie. The needle-drops were pretty mixed as well, especially compared to Gunn’s past films, though I did really like the closing song, “Punkrocker” by The Teadybears featuring Iggy Pop. That’ll be in my head for days.

Between the overwritten plot, the sprawling cast, the neat-and-tidy resolution to the conflict and the glaring visuals, this is a Superman reboot that screams generic superhero movie at the top of its lungs. DC needed a Superman that could truly soar and instead we got a predictable, run-of-the-mill, weirdly pedestrian movie that’s mostly just painfully mediocre. James Gunn’s fingerprints are all over this one, and I think that’s the biggest problem. We needed a more straight-laced director to help Superman soar, and a script that tapped more earnestly into its universal themes of goodness and heroism, rather than just another superhero movie riddled with half-baked one-liners and the same-old same-old plot we’ve come to expect from the genre.

What a crushing disappointment.