Movie Review: “Superman” (2025)

Director: James Gunn

Cast: David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Isabela Merced, Alan Tudyk, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Neva Howell, Skyler Gisondo

Plot: Superman is in the midst of an international conflict during which an unknown metahuman beat him in a punch-up, whilst Lex Luthor manipulates the situation to discredit Superman and the Man of Steel tries to address his public image.

Review: The history of Superman in cinema has swung far in both directions – bright a silly or dark and broody. James Gunn is now taking up the challenge of bringing the original superhero to life and with his track record of weird but heartfelt misanthropes makes him a cool choice to usher in this new era of DC films. As expected, there’s plenty of weird and off-the-wall choices, but whether or not that all amounts to anything is in question.

Rather than resetting us back to the origin story for all the characters and events of the universe, something we’re seen plenty of times before, Gunn is dropping us into a well established and working world of meta-humans and running with us. The fan bases have been talking up this approach, that the directors and producers trust us to hit the ground running, but in practise this doesn’t happen smoothly. The reality is that we’re getting a multipart block of text slowly unfolding on the screen to tell us that metahumans first appeared hundreds of years ago, and Superman landed a few decades ago and these two countries you’ve never heard of are at war and Superman stopped it but some other superhero you’ve never heard of has just beaten the crap out of Superman.

We initially thought the idea of an established Superman (Corenswet) being defeated for the first time would be a good starting point, but that doesn’t get brought up again. Sure, the world’s strongest man just got pummelled by a guy in a tin can suit but we’re never going to speak of it again. That tin-can guy is going to fly around the corner and everyone who just saw that happen will not mention him again. In fact, Superman’s girlfriend find this event so uninteresting that she doesn’t ask Superman how he just gotten beaten up. Don’t think about, it will be explained in two hours of screen time.

So after this set up and Lois (Brosnahan) does a mock-interview with Superman (I actually thought this would be a framing device for the story, turns out its a nothing plot point) where they explain the political conflict in more detail and Superman complains about mean social media about him. It’s difficult to lay out the key plot points from this point because there’s a huge number of things happening amid Lex Luthor (Hoult) releasing monsters and opening portals into pocket universes to distract Superman so Lex can take over half a country so he can kill Superman or something. The unexpected side-effect of this plot is that Superman learns to appreciate his adoptive parents more than his biological parents he never met, which seems to be his character arc. This isn’t a very convincing arc though, since there’s no reason why he would value an old, partial recording of the Kryptonians over his Earth parents he spent his whole childhood with.

Narratively, Superman captures that feeling of picking up a monthly issue of a comic book and being dropped into a story made up of multiple moving parts and characters with a long history between each other without having all the context. Like that childhood experience, it doesn’t make for a very satisfying story experience as we’re jumping between robot fights, interdemensional monsters, superhero teams, journalist side-characters, portals, henchmen, clones and whatever we’ve forgotten and it doesn’t all count for much. There’s been a couple of reviews commenting on this being a ‘low stakes’ Superman story, I guess they forgot the bit where the Earth is splitting in half.

With so many things happening, it’s easy to get stuck on the confusing parts of the story. In every scene in which he appears, Jimmy Olsen (Gisondo) has beautiful women staring at him and flirting with him and begging him for attention and while he acts disgusted and confused. We have no idea what this was about, if it was meant to be a gag or crowbarred in to fill out a plot hole, but it was very weird. For a while we wondered why every scene with Jimmy Olsen cuts away to women giggling at him. Then we find out that Lex’s girlfriend is in love with Jimmy and that’s the only way Lois is able to prove that Luthor is a bad guy. It’s a strange story inclusion and makes them all look like bad journalists.

On the topic of the Daily Planet team, there’s a weird entourage of quirky characters who must be beloved fan favourite comic figures I’ve never heard of, because they are obliged to pop up with some whacky dialogue at every moment. Even in the finale when Lois is flying Mr. Terrific’s spaceship into danger they have to stop and make sure that Jimmy Olsen and Perry White and the sports reporter with a moustache and the chirpy blonde woman and another guy without distinct features all come along to provide more background chatter. None of these characters contribute to the plot, their character’s are nothing and they’d be classed as Red Shirts if they did anything as interesting as get killed.

That’s only a small slice of this giant cast that also includes tech-guy Mr. Terrific (Gathegi), an egotistical Green Lantern (Fillion), a shrieking Hawkgirl (Merced), some ‘Ultraman’ who is stronger than Superman (something no-one questions), a nano-bot lady, an elemental man, a green baby, a super-dog, Rick Flag’s dad and so forth. In this world of Metahumans, Superman is the glowing beacon of hope, and the way this is achieved is by making everyone else a complete shitheel. Everyone in this world is snarky and mean, and Superman is the only ‘hero’ who doesn’t spend their day rolling his eyes of people and I guess that makes him special. I guess if Superman doesn’t want to kill a giant rampaging monster while the other superheroes call him a ‘pussy’ he’s a nice guy? Even Krypto the Superdog is an asshole, he spends most of the movie biting at people and yapping.

Then Supergirl turns up drunk at the end and calls Superman a ‘bitch’ and that point we’re pretty fed up with everyone being an asshole to each other.

There’s some good ideas here, including dropping us into a baked-in superhero universe and seeing if we can swim, but it doesn’t come together in a satisfying way. This still feels like an attempt to over-correct from Synder’s universe. Gunn goes out of his way to show Superman is saving people and dogs and squirrels, but his ability to look beyond what’s in front of him at that moments makes him look more dense than good. While Superman saved a squirrel from a rampaging giant monster, that monster was still destroying the city.

Unfortunately, this is the first Gunn film that didn’t work for me. It’s biggest value is contributing to cameo bingo cards.

Rating: FOUR out of TEN