Superman Review: James Gunn and Cast Discover a Long Lost Magic

James Gunn’s long-anticipated Superman has the best special effect I’ve seen in a summer blockbuster this year—and I don’t mean the digitally aided flying or fighting. There is plenty of that too, most of it impressive and some of it astonishing. But that’s expected in a superhero movie these days, especially one with as much riding on it as this glitzy and expensive reset of the DC cinematic universe.

No, I’m talking about the electricity that blasts off whenever David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan share a scene. The newest versions of Clark and Lois, Superman and His Girl Friday, their performances mark the first time in decades I’ve felt the vital, crackling spark needed between these characters, particularly Broshnahan’s Lane. Her relentless tenacity suggests that here is a star reporter with multiple Pulitzers cluttering a closet somewhere. Whenever the pair kiss, banter, or battle (particularly battle), Superman bares the type of soul it’s easy to forget these complex studio products with all their many bells and whistles, and corporate obligations, can exude.

So it is both Superman’s great power to locate that soul as well as a kind of kryptonite that the film is then forced to only use it in moderation. Because believe me reader, during the first act set mostly around the Daily Planet Building where Clark, Lois, and even Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) go about their day, I was all in. Finally, we have a Superman movie that conveys to the viewer why these archetypes have endured for nearly a century. The film’s writer-director even finds a singularly James Gunnian way to explain how much he gets who this character is: When Lois explains that she was punk rock cynical in college versus what she assumes was a young Clark admiring the inner-child in every person he meets, the hopelessly innocent Clark protests, “maybe that is punk rock?”

That charmingly, guilelessly Midwestern answer is Superman.

Yet Superman, the 2025 movie, is still also that product which must wear many hats and accomplish many objectives that were set for it on a spreadsheet somewhere, especially in regard to table-setting the aforementioned new shared universe. In a handful of scenes, or a look of wholesome generosity in Corenswet’s gaze, Gunn confirms he can make a great Superman story about Lois, Jimmy, Lex Luthor, and Big Boy Blue. But Superman is not that movie—or at least it’s not only that movie.

After all, more than a few paragraphs in, I’ve yet to mention the other superheroes—err metahumans like Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi). Or in addition to Nicholas Hoult’s appropriately smug and sinister Lex, there is not one but two giant alien monsters attacking Metropolis, Lex’s various, often inexplicably superpowered minions, and even a foreign country trying to commit genocide on a neighboring ethnic population with the U.S. government’s complicity (huh). Plus Krypto, the Superdog. But don’t worry about him, all you need to know about Krypto is that he’s the bestest good boy, and possibly had his role beefed up after trailers proved he was a winner with audiences. If so, every extra moment given to this powerful pooch was a wise decision and money well spent.

In fact, the furry dude begins the movie in a scene you likely have already seen: Superman is battered and broken after his first defeat at the hands of a mysterious masked foe. The beatdown came, we are told, in the aftermath of Superman interfering and preventing a genocide being committed by one fictional white country on their fictional neighbors with brown complexions. His opponent claims to be the Hammer of Boravia, but in reality he is a tool of Lex Luthor, a tech billionaire with a serious inferiority complex whenever he stares at Superman.

Despite being rich, famous, and supposedly a genius, Lex feels inadequate when compared to a foreign immigrant welcomed with open arms by America and the world at large. So he enacts a convoluted and depressingly plausible plan to turn public opinion against Superman, beginning on social media and culminating with Superman agreeing to be offloaded by the government into Lex’s prison hidden in a very offshore location where Lex disposes of other “aliens” and those he deems undesirable.

And with this throughline, Superman has a pretty straightforward and curiously timely setup. But I’ve also left out the fact Superman, the movie and the character, has to spend as many or more minutes opening a cinematic universe starter kit of cameos via the “Justice Gang” (they’re still working on the name), Clark’s own identity crisis as a Kryptonian trying to assimilate to life on Earth, and then getting home in time to find out how Lois will react after he was the first to say in their young relationship, “I love you.” 

There are a lot of plates being kept in the air, and it is a testament to Gunn’s command for writing and worldbuilding that it never feels overwhelming. Indeed, I’d say it’s rather a marvel how much it resembles an old school comic book, or more specifically Superman: The Animated Series (for my fellow ‘90s kids out there). Perhaps this is the first issue/episode you’ve ever picked up. Technically it offers a zippy and lighthearted self-contained adventure, but it’s also stuck in the middle of a larger saga already in motion. So unlike other shared universes, the surplus of added superheroes does not feel like only fan service. They’re part and parcel for a world, and Gathegi in particular steals scenes as a grumpy Mr. Terrific.

But even as Gunn proves to innately understand how to build this world, the film propping it up still comes across as cluttered and busy at times, particularly in the back half. The main narrative is about a genuinely good dude forced to confront a tech narcissist that’s eager to send him to DC’s veritable El Salvador black hole. But that narrative is submerged in a film that smoothly, but still somewhat desperately, tap dances its way through a coterie of C-lister introductions. Gunn conveys sincere affection for all these obscure deep cuts, but the movie’s narrative struggles balancing them all.

It thus becomes a missed opportunity when Kal-El has as many or more scenes with Mr. Terrific as he does with Lois Lane. Similarly, in a new context where Superman is the latest metahuman, instead of the first this world has ever known about, Lex’s jealousy and the world’s infatuation feels more inexplicable (even if it is vaguely suggested the other heroes are more akin to corporate shills before the Man of Steel came along).

Ultimately the movie is overcrowded. And yet, that gnawing flaw is constantly overshadowed by splashes of the extraordinary. The action is again vividly realized and frequently elevated since Gunn and composers John Murphy and David Fleming decided to stop fighting gravity and just accept they must use the John Williams theme when and wherever possible (now with electric guitar riffs!). Gunn similarly finds space to repeat his Yondu arrow trick in Guardians of the Galaxy with Mr. Terrific’s T-Spheres. It’s still a winner.

The real strength though remains the ensemble and how well cast and complementary they are. It’s a big troupe—I haven’t even mentioned Hawkgirl, Ma and Pa Kent, or a new Miss Tessmocker for the influencer age—but while broadly drawn, they’re each memorable and get a big moment or two.

At the center of it all remains Superman and Lois. We’ve had a lot of them over the years, with various versions of the characters coming across as glum, dour, or whatever Superman Returns was supposed to be. In comic book academia terms, I suspect that Gunn is pulling a lot more from John Byrne’s reinvention of the pair, with a helping dose of Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman sprinkled in, than the golden or silver age comics that informed Christopher Reeve and Richard Donner nearly half a century ago.

But speaking in more abstract, ephemeral terms, Gunn, Corenswet, and Brosnahan didn’t just channel a few more recent eras of comicdom. They also elicited a magic trick I haven’t seen since Christopher Reeve. Unlike every other live action actor since 1980, I wasn’t watching some guy playing Superman. I was simply watching Superman. And he is opposite likely the best onscreen Lois we’ve ever had. It really is a nifty effect, and one where the sky is the limit if next time Gunn can hone in without all the other distractions.

Superman flies into theaters on Friday, July 11.