Between Marvel’s rapidly growing universe and DC’s scrambling to catch up, it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the superhero genre, while being one of the biggest continuous moneymakers in Hollywood, might also be starting to grate on people. After all, an origin story is still an origin story, no matter what kind of powers you throw into the mix or which relative you choose to kill. To make a superhero movie now, you have to have something special, something that will set your movie apart and make it feel different than what can feel a little formulaic coming from the larger companies. Into the Spider-Verse had an animation style reminiscent of comic books; Venom capitalized on an anti-hero (however the movie turned out); the current show The Boys focuses on superheroes who’ve been corrupted and must be kept under control. In a little bit of that thread, Brightburn asks a simple question: what if Superman was a bad person? What if, instead of being a hero for mankind, he was a danger to us all? As a premise, it’s not a bad one – the idea of Superman going dark isn’t exactly new, there is an excellent game series based around it – but this film seemed to get stuck at a bit of a crossroads on how to actually make the premise work. The concept is a horror superhero, but there was almost too much Superman, and not enough of an attempt to flesh out the concept to make it something new.
After years of trying to have children, Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle Breyer (David Denman) have almost given up hope when a spaceship crashes in the woods behind their farm, holding nothing but a mysterious baby boy. They adopt him as their own, name him Brandon, and for the next 12 years, they raise him to be a smart and helpful child, explaining away his arrival as an agency adoption and distracting from the fact that he never bleeds. When Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn) turns 12, however, things start to change – the spaceship that the Breyers hid under their barn floor begins to send out a message that only Brandon can hear, he discovers his incredible strength and indestructible power, and he begins to grow temperamental and hostile towards anyone attempting to exercise control over him. Tori and Kyle are forced to tell him about his past and how he came to be their son, and Brandon starts to become more and more unstable. He decides that he is special, and that the whole world is going to see that.
When you think about it, there is a lot of great material in a superhero’s story for a horror film. It’s why characters even in regular superhero films are nervous about superheroes (it’s the whole motivator behind Suicide Squad, even though that plot had a hole a truck could drive through) – with people who are that strong, with that kind of power, there is a danger should they ever decide to use that power for dark purposes. It’s frightening when it could be an adult, who fully knows the difference between right and wrong, but it’s almost more-so in a prepubescent child, who is still grasping the concept and only really cares about immediate satisfaction. A child with no self-control and unlimited power is more frightening than an adult because, theoretically, you can reason with an adult. Brandon highlights that frightening possibility – he can stick his hand in a rotating lawnmower and win, he can fly up to commercial plane height, and he has laser eyes. Do you really want an unstable 12-year-old with LASER EYES running around? Excuse me, flying around? So, theoretically, as a horror story, this should have been an excellent start. The problem? Well, other than a few moments of rather gruesome deaths, there is nothing really “horrifying” about the movie. It’s more about the body count than about actually being scary. Okay, that’s not terrible, except that there are not a ton of kills either (and one happens completely offscreen). There are a couple of moments of gore, don’t get me wrong (the jaw thing alone had me cringing for quite awhile), but at the same time, it doesn’t seem to be enough to really be a horror film. So, they wanted to double down on the superhero of it all. Did that work out well?
Sort of. The movie was pitched to audiences as “Superman gone evil”, but the character is not actually Clark Kent. He could come from Krypton, but we don’t know anything about that. He has some of the same powers as Clark Kent. But this is a different character – so why does it still feel so…Superman? Not to mention that the finale of the film starts to throw around unnamed characters who seem a lot like Aquaman and Wonder Woman. I get that the story was meant to be a horror take on Superman’s mythology, but by being so Superman without being the actual character, it ended up leaving big gaps in the story, because it’s NOT Superman, but they didn’t try to create a new mythos for a new character either. For instance, it’s unclear whether or not Brandon has always been a bit of a psychopath, or if it’s something that the alien spaceship awoke in him. We see no signs of it before the spaceship starts sending messages to him, but at the same time, it seems as though the people around town have always been a little wary of him. Is it just because he was adopted? That seems like a bit of a stretch, and even after Brandon has caused some bodily harm in public, it’s not enough to get the sheriff to actually press serious charges (at least not immediately), which suggests that Brandon has never even shown an inclination of problems before. So is Brandon a psychopath because he’s an alien, or is he a psychopath who has access to abilities most psychopath’s don’t? Committing to one of those two backstories would have been a way to take this story to the next level, to make it something more, but apparently the hope that a scary Superman would be all the story would need is what floated this script. Then we start on the other people who fill the script; most of them have only one real characteristic, and there is never a lot of depth given to them. It’s neither enough to make us hate them and cheer when Brandon kills them or enough to make us like them and gasp when he kills them. Their final moments are so obvious, the death sequences so foreshadowed, that we’re just waiting for them to come and hoping that the death is gory enough that it is a little interesting to watch.
2.5 /5
The script was written by Brian and Mark Gunn, and produced by James Gunn. So basically this is what happens when you combine Guardians of the Galaxy and The Belko Experiment, and honestly, I would suggest you just watch either of those.
ReelTalk 