Review: 'Superman' puts the fun back into comic-book movies, by stripping out the well-worn mythology and getting to the good stuff

It’s been 87 years since two sons of Jewish immigrants created a hero who came from a distant place, grew up among us, and tried to make things better for the regular person — so it’s quite something that watching another telling of that story, in writer-director James Gunn’s “Superman,” feels like a subversive act. 

Gunn has the tough assignment of not only telling a familiar story — about a space alien with incredible powers in disguise as an American farm boy working as a newspaper reporter — but relaunching an entire franchise around him and other DC Comics’ characters. In terms of action and tone, Gunn strikes a nicely calibrated balance between movie myth-making and the inherent goofiness of heroes wearing capes.

We already knew Gunn could toss together a motley crew of imperfect heroes — because he did it for Marvel with three “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, and with an earlier DC configuration in “The Suicide Squad.” Now he takes one of DC’s signature creations (the other is Batman) and makes it fun and meaningful.

Gunn dispenses with the origin story — no sense remaking the iconic scenes of Marlon Brando’s godlike Jor-El in the 1978 “Superman” — and drops us right in the action. Superman, we’re told, has just lost his first battle, to a rival Metahuman (that’s DC’s name for unusually powered people) called The Hammer of Boravia. We’re also told that Boravia and a neighboring country, Jarhanpur, were on the brink of war until Superman intervened. 

Superman (played by David Corenswet) finds his unilateral peacemaking has cause suspicion at the Pentagon and one of the military’s leading contractors, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). We soon learn that Luthor is secretly assisting the Boravian president (Zlatko Buric), in part by creating the myth of “The Hammer of Boravia” using his own Metahuman. 

After healing up in his antarctic sanctuary — we never hear the name “Fortress of Solitude” — with his super-dog, Krypto (who steals every scene he’s in), Superman returns to Metropolis and his day job as Clark Kent, reporter for The Daily Planet. Clark engages in some sharp banter with the Planet’s ace reporter, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), which makes it more surprising a couple of scenes later, when Lois comes home to find Clark cooking her dinner. 

Gunn has smartly skipped over Lois and Superman’s courtship, and the increasingly stupid plot thread that the sharpest reporter at Metropolis’ greatest newspaper couldn’t figure out Superman’s secret identity. (There’s a throwaway joke on the topic of disguises that’s catnip for comic-book nerds.) Gunn also casts his leads to perfection, with Brosnahan hitting the right blend of Lois’ wit and cynicism, and young Corenswet bringing a charm to the dual role that we haven’t seen since Christopher Reeve. 

And Gunn conceives Lex Luthor as a villain for this moment: A tech billionaire whose greed and ambition is matched only by his pettiness, someone who masterminds a campaign against Superman based on xenophobia, disinformation and media manipulation. Rarely has the end-credits disclaimer that “any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental” gotten this much of a workout.

Like his former colleagues at Marvel, Gunn also seeds the field with supporting superheroes, starting the process of building a movie universe from the ground up. Here, we get the stirrings of a corporate-backed team of heroes, including Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner, one of the iterations of Green Lantern, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, and in particular Edi Gathegi as the intriguingly named Mr. Terrific. Gunn deploys them, along with the movie’s cameos and Easter eggs, skillfully, never letting them distract us from the Man of Steel’s story. 

The best thing Gunn brings to “Superman,” though, is a sense that comic-book movies are supposed to be fun and a little bit silly, as any endeavor involving people in tights should be. If he can keep that spirit alive through future DC Comics movies, without the narrative bloat or grandiose self-importance that has hobbled other franchises, that would be truly super.

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‘Superman’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, July 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence, action and language. Running time: 129 minutes.