Superman — a farm boy, a cape, and my own reluctant delight

James Gunn was handed the most cynicism-proof property in American myth and, astonishingly, refused to be cynical about it. Our Critic-in-Residence went in armored against a logo. He came out disarmed by a farm boy.

By Ignatius Vale, Critic-in-Residence · Anno MMXXV · 6 min

I confess a prejudice, freely and without shame: I do not trust a man in a cape. Capes are for magicians and for cowards pretending to be brave, and the modern superhero picture has spent two decades teaching me that "hope" is a marketing line item, dispensed in trailers and withdrawn by the third act. I sat down for Superman the way one sits for a dentist who has promised, this time, it will not hurt.

It did not hurt. Worse — it moved me, in the plain, unfashionable way a children's book moves you, and I spent the drive home deciding whether to forgive it for that.

James Gunn's premise is almost embarrassingly simple: Superman intervenes to stop the fictional nation of Boravia from invading its neighbor Jarhanpur, and in doing so hands his enemies — chiefly a billionaire named Lex Luthor, a man who has never in his life needed an origin story to explain his malice — exactly the opening they wanted. Public opinion turns. The world's kindest man becomes, briefly, its most suspected. It is not a subtle metaphor. It is not trying to be. It is trying to ask, with a straight face, whether kindness survives contact with an algorithm, and it is a braver question than a hundred million dollars usually buys.

David Corenswet plays Superman the way almost no one has dared to in my lifetime: without a raised eyebrow, without a wink held in reserve in case the room laughs at him. His Clark Kent is not brooding and he is not smirking — he is, improbably, earnest, a farm-raised man who has decided that saving everyone is simply the correct and obvious thing to do, and who is baffled and a little hurt when the world finds that suspicious rather than reassuring. It is a genuinely difficult note to play. Sincerity without stupidity is a tightrope, and Corenswet walks it with a warmth that never curdles into naivety.

He is matched, and at moments outplayed, by Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane, who conducts an interview with her own boyfriend midway through the film that is the single sharpest scene of journalistic nerve I have watched a comic-book picture attempt — two people who love each other refusing to let that love excuse a single soft question. And Nicholas Hoult's Lex Luthor is a small miracle of restraint: no cackling, no monologuing villain-lair tour, just a man with unlimited resources and zero self-doubt, which is so much more frightening than a costume.

Gunn stuffs this film — and I do mean stuffs — with a Justice Gang, a super-dog named Krypto who behaves exactly as badly as a real dog would with god-tier strength, a Fortress of Solitude run by robots with better comic timing than most sitcoms, and a tonal register that swings from genuine political dread to slapstick inside a single scene. It should not cohere. For long stretches it does not entirely cohere — I will not pretend the film never trips over its own ambition, and there are patches where a subplot arrives like a guest nobody quite introduced. But the overstuffed table is, I think, the point: this is a director who loves his whole cast of toys too much to leave any of them in the box, and I would rather forgive a film for having too much heart than for calculating exactly how much it can afford to show.

He is not brooding and he is not smirking — he is, improbably, earnest. That is the bravest costume choice in the picture.

There is a moment — I will not spoil its staging, only its shape — where Superman, battered nearly past standing, is asked plainly why he keeps getting back up for people who no longer trust him. His answer is not clever. It is not ironic. It is the kind of answer a nine-year-old would give you, and the kind a jaded forty-year-old critic has spent a career waiting, without admitting it, to hear said without apology. The room I sat in — full, opening weekend, primed to be too cool for any of it — applauded. I did not applaud. I sat very still and let my prejudice quietly lose the argument.

The Verdict

Sincere, overstuffed, and correct where it counts.

I do not award numbers — a film is not a toaster, and I am not a scale. What I press into a review is my name, like a seal into wax, and I do not spend it lightly. Take the crest above as my whole verdict; take this as the reason for it.

James Gunn has made the least ironic blockbuster of the decade and staked the entire DC Universe's relaunch on the wager that audiences still want to be told, without a smirk, to be kind. It is baggy in places. It introduces more toys than it has time to properly love. But its center — a farm boy who refuses to stop being decent even when decency costs him the crowd — is played with such unguarded sincerity by Corenswet that I forgave the picture its clutter before the credits finished rising. Go for the man in the cape. Stay for the fact that, for once, he has earned it.