[2]

I haven't wanted to walk out of a movie I paid for in a long, long time, but I damn near walked out of this one. "Man of Steel" is ridiculously awful. At best (if I weren't a Superman fan), it'd be "Transformers 4", another busily boring, loud, emotionally bankrupt piece of nauseating, over-indulgent, digital miasma. But if you are a Superman fan, this film is downright offensive and insulting.

I’m all for a re-boot every few decades, but “Superman” simply HAS to be about Clark Kent and Lois Lane. If you don’t like those characters and invest in their relationship, then all that’s left is an invincible man doing invincible things. How boring.

And just because director Zack Snyder has shit flying toward, past, under, over, and through the camera for two and a half (god-forsaken) hours, doesn’t mean the movie’s exciting. The action is hollow, full of sound and fury, signifying bullshit. There’s nothing to hang your hat on this movie, emotionally or viscerally. The non-linear treatment of the exposition is poorly paced and lazy, robbing the material of all grace or sincerity. There’s a pitiful attempt to make Clark Kent/Superman an ‘outsider’, afraid to let his true identity known, but it’s a faint afterthought that barely registers. Character development is as deep as dew drop here, and whenever the movie tries to cash in on iconic moments, they land with a thud or a laugh because they aren’t earned. And then there’s the last forty minutes of non-stop whiz-bang CGI action, the equivalent of having Zack Snyder personally jack off in your face.

I can’t really judge Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, or Russel Crowe’s performances because they don’t have much to work with (even though Crowe refuses to leave the movie, popping up more times than a whack-a-mole and dying at least twice). Michael Shannon sucks as General Zod, though. Someone should have told him that truly evil characters don’t need to scream and shout, but that’s decidedly the tone of “Man of Steel” — it’s not just a turd, but a screaming turd.

There aren’t even any minor victories here: the production and conceptual designs sucked, the score sucked, the color palette is predictably dull and subdued, the camera shakes through the whole damned movie (giving me a headache), the editing is atrocious… I am truly hard pressed to find one good thing to say about this flick. I hate it with the fire of a thousand red suns, and it sickens my heart to know that anyone might be introduced to Superman this way.