Suicide Squad

‘If all our goodies are so bad, then maybe our baddies might turn out to be good..?’

This, clearly, must have been the thinking at DC Towers when they green-lit this movie. After the massive, almost global-level, raspberries that were blown at its recent Superman and Superman vs Batman movies, something had to be done. So the bigwigs at Marvel’s ailing rival decided to get down and dirty.

And undoubtedly, on paper Suicide Squad (2016) sounds like a great idea. Simply inject mini-bombs into the necks of a group of super baddies, then send them out to covertly tackle the obscenely hazardous jobs that nobody else can do. Brilliant! But the question is: by this point, is there any idea so good that DC can’t make a complete Horlicks of it?

The plot

With Superman presumed dead, impressively nasty government mandarin Amanda Wheeler has assembled a motley collection of proper wrong ‘uns to tackle any emerging super-powered threats.

The star of her embryonic team is the Enchantress, a polite young lady possessed by an incredibly powerful sixteenth century witch. But it’s okay because Wheeler has the witch’s heart locked in a sealed box, and so can control her. Until the witch steals her heart back within the first ten minutes and starts building a device that will destroy the world. (Though she’d better get a move on if she wants to beat Trump to it.)

The Suicide Squad are unleashed to tackle the new threat, without anyone pausing to acknowledge that their enemy is simply one of their own members gone to pot, the super baddie equivalent of a sacked burger chain worker pissing in the French fries. The stark fact is, if Wheeler hadn’t tried to form the Suicide Squad, the whole mess literally wouldn’t have happened. At source, this is an HR problem dressed up as an action movie.

The cast

First, the good news: the ladies own this movie. Both the bonkers Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and cold-as-ice Amanda Wheeler (Viola Davis) are terrific.

Will Smith, being Will Smith, of course insisted on his Deadshot character having a schmaltzy backstory (he’s a great dad, doesn’t hurt women and kids, quite the gentleman etc) that jars horribly with the rest of the movie. It’s fascinating how the former Fresh Prince, who in real-life literally worships an alien race of giant lizards – Hello, Scientology! – always ensures he plays grounded characters.

Then there’s Joker. During filming, Jared Leto apparently got into his villainous role by sending live rats and dead pigs to fellow cast members, and watching footage of real gangland killings.

All of which sounds a lot more interesting than anything he manages on screen. Admittedly, Heath Ledger’s titanic Joker performance, crystalized by his early death, was always going to be a tough act to follow. But Leto’s turn here, hammy and mannered without the remotest sense of threat, is pure panto. (Perhaps he should have remembered Laurence Olivier’s advice to that other method junkie, Dustin Hoffman: “My dear boy, why not just try acting?”)

Unsurprisingly, given that the rest of the Squad are each given roughly one-and-a-half lines to establish their character, they remain cardboard cut-outs.

Is this movie any good?

Not according to Rotten Tomatoes, which gave the movie a measly 26 per cent. However, Exploding Helicopter suspects that, after the turgid Man of Steel and the unending torture of Batman vs Superman, critics had already decided that the next DC movie was due for a good kicking.

This seems a mite unfair. True, Suicide Squad is crass, simplistic and dangerously uneven, and nicks ingredients from better movies with grave abandon. But there are some good performances and it rollocks along at such an entertaining pace that there’s not time to consider how duff it all really is.

Exploding helicopter action

There are three helicopter crashes in Suicide Squad, though only the second one actually results in an explosion. It happens when a freshly rescued Harley Quinn is smooching Joker on the opened back ramp of a military chopper. Suddenly a missile hits the front of the craft and Harley, back-flipping out on to the roof of a building below, lands in time to momentarily see the flaming craft hurtling earthwards before it disappears behind another skyscraper. Oh, no! Will Joker survive? Yes.

Artistic merit

Precious little. A standard CGI explosion, at night (always a cop-out), followed by a quick shot of the flaming craft going out of sight. This is seriously middling stuff.

Exploding helicopter innovation.

Nada. Niet. Zero. None.

Non-exploding helicopter action

The sorry spectacle of the weak explosion is partially redeemed by the two non-exploding crashes, which once more prove right a pet theory of Exploding Helicopter – that it is technically impossible for a named character to be killed, or even seriously hurt, by a chopper smash, no matter how catastrophic it looks.

Early on, a chopper carrying the whole Suicide Squad is hit by gun-fire. Hurtling fifty feet towards the ground, it crashes onto a concrete city street then rolls over at high speed around seventeen times. There’s even an internal shot of our heroes bouncing around inside, like an old pair of trainers in a washing machine.

Of course, the actual result of such a crash would be smashed bones, cracked heads, massive internal hemorrhage and across the board deadness. But naturally, this being an action movie, everyone emerges without a scratch. Harley Quinn even gets to say: “That was fun!”

Later in the film, a helicopter containing Suicide Squad Svengali Amanda Wheeler (basically the Simon Cowell of super villain groups, only not so vindictive) is smashed out of the sky and totally wrecked. Naturally, everyone else aboard the craft is rendered either dead or unconscious, but our Mandy’s tip-top and strutting around the place again within minutes.

Favourite line

Spoken by a prison guard, as Deadshot holds a gun to his head: “Ames, If this man shoots me, I want you to kill him and I want you to go clear my browser history.”

Review by: Chopper

Godzilla

Who would have guessed that, in a movie featuring 300-foot tall, fire-breathing monsters, the most unbelievable characters would all be human?

Oh, dear. When promising newcomer Gareth Edwards was handed a £160 million budget for only his second movie – on the strength of his lo-fi (and low budget) debut hit, Monsters – hopes were high. But sadly, the Wunderkind has produced a steaming great pile of dino-plop.

Still, there is at least some good news: the monsters themselves are fabulous. They look sinister, they move convincingly and their guttural, ear-bending shrieks send a shiver down the spine. Besides Big G himself, there’s a couple of black, spindly, bird-like giants (called Mutos) who entertainingly go on a monster-sized ASBO rampage across the globe.

As for the director’s much-criticised decision to do a very slow reveal of the beasts (for the first hour, all you get are snatched half-glimpses or blurred images on TV screens), it actually works a treat. The gradual build-up of tension makes for a spectacular visual treat when the monsters are finally revealed in their full glory.

Equally, much of the disaster-style footage is spot on. A succession of images – ruined, tottering skyscrapers; battleships tossed about like bath toys; wrecked urban landscapes – really stick in the brain.

But then the actors have to go and ruin it all by speaking.

It’s true. The monsters may be levelling entire cities, but the film itself is ultimately brought down by a hokey plot, terrible dialogue and ropey acting. No-one emerges unscathed.

Bryan Cranston, afforded almost demi-god status after his turn in Breaking Bad, looks like a man who’s just realised how terrible the film is. He croaks and whines ineffectually for a bit, then wisely decides to die half an hour in.

Leading buff-boy Aaron Taylor-Johnson utters not a single memorable line, and merely bounces around from one action scene to another.

But it’s in the ‘war room’ that things really take a tumble. David Strathairn joins a bevy of lantern-jawed military types to bark out the usual guff about ‘having a visual’ and ‘needing situational awareness’.

Such scenes are rarely inspiring, but in Godzilla they are comically poor. Even the basic walking-and-talking choreography is noticeably bad. You can actually see actors stepping three paces to the left to find their mark before delivering a line. It’s desperately hammy stuff.

Ken Watanabe praying for his bowels to move

And it gets worse. Ken Watanabe, brought in to be the ‘Japanese’ guy, is little more than a cartoon. Every line he utters is a wise proverb, delivered with a pained look suggestive of constipation worries. His performance makes Cato from the Pink Panther films look nuanced.

By the time he ponderously pulls out an old time-piece (‘It…was…my father’s’) that supposedly froze at the moment Hiroshima struck, you haven’t the heart to point out a wind-up watch wouldn’t actually have stopped.

But, in a crowded field, poor Sally Hawkins carries off the worst actor accolade. Constantly fretting, worrying and semi-sobbing, she’s resembles nothing more than a modern-day Stan Laurel.

The piss-awful weakness of the human story here is strange, because the strength of the central characters’ relationship in Edwards’ Monsters was its defining quality. It all strongly suggests the studio leaned heavily on the young director to make a bland and accessible piece of pap.

All of which begs the question: why does Hollywood keep on giving blockbuster movies to auteurs? Suppose, say, someone was really skilled at flying a model airplane; you wouldn’t sit them in the cockpit of a commercial airliner and tell them to hit the thruster. But Hollywood does this all the time.

The very skills that make Edwards a good small movie-maker – strong personal vision, an ability to improvise, skilful handling of a small cast – make him a terrible fit for a baggy, committee-led blockbuster.

This point was demonstrated last year when the hugely talented visionary Guillermo del Toro managed to make the $190million Pacific Rim one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory.

Godzilla ponders the absence of a heavyweight
acting co-star

The problem is simple. A blockbuster director is a particular kind of beast – usually a high-functioning sociopath – who’s generally mad enough to take on a studio, loudly threaten to resign, Fed-Ex their own doo-doo to the company president etc. Auteurs just can’t achieve such giddy heights.

Put it this way: you probably won’t see a lo-fi indie film about disenchanted shop clerks directed by Michael Bay coming to a cinema anywhere near you soon. So why are the sensitive types taking on such huge projects, especially when the results are so consistently dire?

And be assured, no cliché is left un-mined in this tosh. Cute kid noticing the monster first? Of course. (Twice.) Loved one trapped fatally behind glass door and sharing final moments with lover? Oh, yes. Hero improbably finding himself eye-to-massive-eye with the giant monster? Yes, about five times – it’s almost like they’re dating.

Ultimately, beset by demands to make a film anyone can like, Edwards has produced something that very likely no-one will give a toss about. Ironically, he is gobbled up by his own monster movie.

Artistic merit

It’ll be no surprise to learn the chopper scene is poorly handled. Facing a monster with a reach of around 400-feet, the chopper pilot goes in shooting and flies right under its left nipple. Unsurprisingly, said beastie immediately swats chopper. Duh. What did the pilot think was going to happen?

Exploding helicopter innovation

None. Godzilla has previously destroyed helicopters in Roland Emmerich's risible 1998 franchise offering.

Positives

This scene takes place at an airport, and there’s a nice shot of the nervy airport crowd watching from behind a huge glass wall as the chopper hits a few airplanes and triggers a series of explosions.

Negatives

The short-lived monster and helicopter encounter has zero tension, and makes even less sense. Expensive, pointless, confusing: it could be a metaphor for the film as a whole.

Favourite quote

Ken Watanabe is clearly in the movie purely for the moment when he stagily turns round, panto-style, and declaims: “They call him…GOR-ZIYYA!”

Interesting fact

Despite the galumphing bad reviews for Godzilla, Gareth Edwards has just been handed the reins for the next Star Wars movie. Given the previous Star Wars trilogy featured some of the wonkiest acting on record (Hayden Christensen’s love scene with Natalie Portman regularly tops Worst Scene of All Time lists), they’ve clearly got the right man for the job.

Review by: Chopper

Still want more? Then check out Jafo discussing Godzilla with a bunch of other cool folk on The Large Association of Movie Blogs podcast on the film.

White House Down

Action movies set in the White House are like buses: you wait ages for one then two trundle along virtually at the same time.

Following the lamentable Olympus Has Fallen, in which Gerard Butler saved the free world largely by stabbing people in the head and neck, here comes an altogether breezier take on the kidnapped President trope.

The plots of the two films are spookily identical. Both boast a washed-up hero, traitorous agent, ‘cute’ kid and secret bunkers. Even the fake money demands to mask dastardly nuclear ambitions are carbon copied. But where Olympus was set in rainy darkness and gloried in its wearisome uber-violence (there’s a lovely scene where a pension-aged lady is repeatedly kicked in the stomach), White House Down takes place on a sunny day and is, for all intents, halfway to being a comedy.

Certainly, Channing Tatum is much more likeable than Gerard Butler. (Having said that, Pol Pot was more likeable than Gerard Butler.) Normally, one should never trust a man whose neck is wider than his head, but Tatum lollops around the White House like a big, enthusiastic puppy and, between the cartoony fight scenes, gamely plays along with the film’s fromage-laden tone.

President Jamie Foxx, it turns out, is planning to withdraw troops from the Middle East so baddies storm the White House. Absolutely everyone is either killed or taken hostage – except Tatum and his precocious young daughter, natch.

While Tatum creeps stealthily around the corridors, still getting into scrapes at every turn, his tweenie offspring blunders around the entire building for ages without being spotted. She even records the baddies on her smartphone and posts the clips to news stations.

Tatum: owner of Hollywood's most ripped neck

(Incidentally, it’s a chief failing of action movies that kids are always plucky, resourceful and insanely tech-savvy. One longs to see a kiddie hostage just sobbing in a corner in a puddle of their own urine, which is clearly what would actually happen.)

It quickly transpires that President Foxx has been betrayed by his head of secret service, James Woods. (Presumably, Brian Cox was busy). Tatum manages to spring the First Dude and, with the pair trapped in the building among hordes of terr’ists, all is primed for a classic buddy action movie. Which, against the odds, is broadly what you get.

Of course, this being a Roland Emmerich movie, half of Washington has to be destroyed first. Bye, bye, Capitol Building. So long, White House roof. (There’s also a self-reverential quip about buildings going up ‘like something from Independence Day’, which no-one but the director will have enjoyed.)

There’s a weird mixture of acting chops on display. Jamie Foxx, aware that this won’t be the movie to bag him a second Oscar, has fun with his faux-Obama role. Lance Reddick, a former big hitter from The Wire, puts on his best game-face and frankly brings more gravitas to his lines than they deserve.

Indie darling Maggie Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, barely bothers to hide how bored she is with her role. In Secretary, she became famous for having her bottom spanked. Here, it’s just her face that looks like a slapped arse.

Most weirdly, Jason Clarke – who spent the first 30 minutes of Zero Dark Thirty exuding genuine menace as he water-boarded an Iraqi captive – is here stared down by the 13-year-old moppet. (Many in the auditorium may have been wishing someone at this point had handed him a bucket of water, flannel and small plank of wood.)

James Wood: Brian Cox was unavailable for this film

One thing is certain: White House Down contains the finest collection of cod-military jargon to grace a screen in some time. Rather than merely see something, this is a world where people ‘have a visual’ or ‘have eyes on’ them. No-one wearing a uniform seems capable of getting through five words without mention of ‘wetwork’, ‘black ops’ or ‘payload delivery’. People with straight faces say things like: ‘Eagle is 30 seconds from the vault: we are coming in hot’.

Of course, not everything is good. The moppet daughter, Scrappy Doo in human form, is allowed to squander way too much screen-time. The fight choreography is ropey: numerous bad guys can be spotted patiently awaiting their turn to get shot or punched. Worst of all, while tussling over the nuclear button at the climax, super buff Jamie Foxx is comprehensively banjoed by 66-year-old James Woods, playing a man who’s terminally ill with cancer.

And yet, it works. Most action movies either play it straight or lazily point to their own crapness with a post-modern wink, as if that excuses everything. (Snakes on a Plane, anyone?) It takes genuine skill to make the audience guffaw at the daftness of the whole endeavour and yet still root for the good guys.

Happily, the film’s producers also seem to have put some thought into the exploding helicopter scene. It occurs when the reliably useless military bigwigs, unaware that the baddies are armed with ‘Javelin’ surface-to-air missiles, send in three choppers under the radar. (‘We have Black Hawks!’)

I hope this isn’t spoiling things, but they all get blasted to smithereens. Once hit, the first casualty careers in low over the White House roof and clips off the American flag, which flutters broken and twisted to the ground. (See what they did there? That’s called a ‘metaphor’, fact fans.) As tradition dictates, the second chopper then hovers around politely waiting to be hit – but it too crashes in a winning fashion, splurging into the White House pond to serve up a rare explosion and big splash combo.

That’s good, but it gets better. The third chopper has time to hover directly over the White House roof, and a dozen marines are already shimmying down long ropes when, oops, the final missile hits. Cue splendid shots of a huge Black Hawk swirling helplessly with flailing marines hanging on to the ropes like its some demented fairground ride, before the whole thing crashes into the roof and explodes.

Exploding helicopter innovation 

It appears that some people actually sat down and spent time debating how they could most entertainingly splatter a few helicopters over the White House. Compare with Olympus Has Fallen, where the cinema audience literally couldn’t tell what was happening for most of the chopper scene.

Positives

Probably the most innovative thing about the whole scene is that Emerich has the brass nuts to let it unfold during a bright, sunny day. Most action directors, painfully self-conscious about the limitations of CGI, hide their chopper conflagrations behind cover of rainstorms or murky darkness. Our Roland has the sense to realise that if you only serve up the explosions in a fresh and quirky way, no-one’s going to be arsed about a bit of unlikely-looking pixilation.

Negatives

When the third chopper crashes through the White House roof, its back rotor blade ends up spinning dangerously up against someone’s face and then stopping…just in time. This tired old trick, first deployed in Mission Impossible and repeated in countless films since, should surely now be allowed to see out its final days in the Exploding Helicopter Rest Home for Overused Scenes.

Interesting fact

Despite creaking unsteadily towards his seventh decade, James Woods turned up at the film’s premiere slobbering all over his latest girlfriend: a 20-year-old moppet. That wasn’t creepy at all.

Review by: Chopper

World War Z

Perhaps World War Zzzzzzzz... would have been a better title.

After countless re-writes (and even re-shoots), this lumbering, re-animated corpse of a film has finally shuffled onto our cinema screens. And what an odd beast it is. Ostensibly based on Max Brook’s acclaimed novel about a zombie apocalypse, it’s a sprawling mess.

As often happens in Hollywood, the film’s producers paid a fortune for the book rights then ripped the innards out of the story. In place of the novel’s interesting reportage approach, they put soupy tosh in which ‘ex UN worker’ Brad Pitt travels the world to find the source of a global zombie pandemic. Then cures it. Single-handedly.

The film kicks off with downtown Philadelphia being over-run by a rapid zombie onslaught. It’s all impressively hectic, and the zombies themselves are super-fast and scarcely seen as individuals. More often, there’s just a sudden blur across the screen as some punter is whacked to the ground.

The director’s signature shot, though, is of a swirling mass of zombies climbing over each other either to push over a bus or summit a giant wall. It’s a bold idea, but the obvious downside is that the zombies couldn’t look more CGI if they had ‘Industrial Light and Magic’ stamped on their foreheads.

Brad narrowly escapes with his straight-from-central-casting family – the weepy wife, older asthmatic kid who needs an inhaler and, yes, even ‘cute’ younger kid who refuses to leave a zombie-marauded flat without her soft toy. Unquestionably, the film would have been more bearable if they’d all been chewed up in the first scene. Useless as characters, they might have at least made a decent meal.

As it is, they stick around like mould for the first half of the film, eating up scenes and adding nothing. It’s just one of many mistakes.

Traditionally, zombies make a variety of moaning noises, but so piss-poor is the script of World War Z that most of the pained groaning comes from the auditorium. Lazy writing prevails. So Brad, supposedly a veteran of war zones, leaves his mobile on while creeping through zombie territory. Do you think it goes off? Well, d’uh.

And when our buff hero enters a locked glass room, there’s a special cut-shot showing him leave his weapon outside. Cripes, maybe now he’ll get trapped inside when the zombie shows up. Even the most knuckle-dragging viewer is beyond such flabby plot-manoeuvring these days, and even the zombies look embarrassed.

The boy Pitt also suffers rather too obviously from leading-man-jinx syndrome. He drives through Philly and it’s suddenly over-run by zombies. He jets off to South Korea and actually causes an attack. (That pesky mobile.) Then he arrives in Israel where, yippee, they’ve built a big wall and everyone’s safe. But no sooner has he done some leonine pouting than here come the zombies and virtually everyone else dies. It’s tempting to think that had they just locked him in a cupboard at the outset, none of this might have happened.

Just over eighty minutes in – and there’s no delicate way to put this – the movie pretty much drops off a cliff. Having hitherto spanned the globe with hugely expensive, thousand extras-featuring setpieces, the ‘action’ suddenly moves to a single, internal ‘medical laboratory’ set – and stays there.

The reason for this sudden stomping on the budget brakes has been exhaustively documented across the internet. In a nutshell, the film’s producers had to scrap the entire original third act (a zombie showdown in Moscow that cost £100 million) after disastrous preview screenings. The snag was, by that time they only had about 33 quid left. And thus the final act.

Here’s what happens. Brad escapes from Jerusalem in a passenger plane and gets a radio message ordering him to head for the one place on earth where mankind can still be saved: Wales. Yes, you did just read that. And don’t worry if you laughed, because so did most of the audience.

Inevitably, zombies have clambered aboard in club class so the plane crash lands in the middle of nowhere, in Wales. (Sorry, that’s a tautology.) Natch, everyone dies in the crash except Brad and a saucy Israeli soldier. Impressively, given that their brief – literally – is to locate ‘a medical facility outside Cardiff’, they find it in no time.

From then on, all you have is Brad and half a dozen British thesps in a Seventies-looking studio set – the sort where the walls wobble if you bang against them. It’s like Doctor Who and Casualty had a one-night stand, and this is the ugly baby. The Brits all look a bit dazed to be in the presence of Hollywood royalty. Brad himself looks like he wants to cry.

The ‘plot’ for this strand is that a potential cure lies in a cut-off wing of the lab populated by a dozen extras-I-mean-zombies. But guess what? These ones don’t move at the speed of sound. That would obviously mean more cameras, snappy editing – more cost, basically – so these ones just loll about in the traditional manner. ‘They’re dormant,’ explains one of the Brits, looking every bit as confused as the audience.

And so follows a Scooby Doo-style mission to reach the cure, with every cliché crammed in – squeaky doors, crawling under windows, ‘almost’ dropping things – all patently calculated to just while away the minutes. And when these zombies do finally start chasing our heroes, there’s no blur-across-the-screen swiftness, just the laboured jogging of forty-something extras trying to run with their arms stretched out without falling over.

The whole segment is a disaster and, in Exploding Helicopter’s experience, literally unprecedented. For context, imagine the final third of Man of Steel taking place in a library; or Lord of the Rings’ climactic battle based entirely in a hobbit hut. It’s all so giddily wrong that the cinema audience were howling with laughter.

In a final twist of the budget knife, the last scene shows Brad reuniting with his family in ‘Nova Scotia’, which couldn’t look more obviously like Wales if there’d been a male choir singing ‘How green is my valley’ in the background. Holding daffodils.

Fortunately, the helicopter crash scene was filmed before the money ran out – otherwise, it may well have featured a Fisher Price toy on a string. What actually happens is this: as literally hundreds of CGI zombies scale a high wall, one military chopper decides that – rather than just shoot from a distance – it’d be better to swoop down really low so they can all hop aboard. The undead hordes obligingly clamber on, and the weighed-down machine first spins then drops to the ground, exploding.

Artistic merit

Nil. What remains is only the memory of how chunkily yet another ‘calamity’ has been constructed from nothing.

Exploding helicopter innovation

The idea – having a chopper weighed down by marauding zombies – is pretty good, but this scene loses massive points for blatantly manufacturing unnecessary danger. Also, the whole episode comes across as a flash-edited barrage of soupy-looking CGI figures. It never remotely feels like you’re watching actual zombies on an actual helicopter.

Do passengers survive?

Given that all those hanging on to the outside are already dead, this is largely an academic point. Presumably the crew die in the explosion or face the horrifying alternative of being eaten alive by an unconvincing special effect. Oh, the shame.

Positives

The most terrifying moment of the entire movie occurs in the first few seconds, when – among the faux news footage clips – Piers Morgan makes a cameo as himself, The sight of his bloated, self-satisfied features in widescreen is truly horrible to behold.

Negatives

This may well be the first bloodless zombie film. So desperate was the studio to secure a PG-13 rating that nothing remotely nasty is allowed to happen onscreen. Which is something of an achievement, when you consider it’s a film about almost the entire population of the Earth rending each other limb from limb with their teeth.

So when Brad brings down a wrench on a fallen zombie, you see nothing but Brad’s head and shoulders. And when he chops off a woman's hand to stop a bite infection spreading, all you see is her worried face. George Romero, this isn’t.

Favourite quote

“We’ve lost the east coast. China is dark.”
No global disaster movie would be complete without a grizzled general gravely muttering this sort of cod-military nonsense.

Interesting fact

The film – with its powerless director, unrealistic schedule and hacked-to-pieces script – has become a symbol of how Hollywood messes up movies. The huge volume of online journalism about the botched job of making the film is far more entertaining than the finished product.

Review by: Chopper

Man Of Steel

It’s perhaps fitting that a movie about a man made of steel should also feature a leaden script, tinny direction and mechanical acting. But that doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

Sad to report, Man of Steel (2013) follows the template of many recent hero movies: fairly bright opening section, dull second act weighed down by exposition and wind-baggery, then a seemingly endless parade of CGI bollocks for the climactic battle.

It’s a pity, because things do start well. The opening sequence on Krypton looks fabulous. Russell Crowe, playing Superman’s Dad, shows why – despite his appalling, mobile-flinging habits – they keep on writing the cheques. Wisely eschewing the freaky ‘Yorksh-Irish’ accent he attempted for Robin Hood, he successfully adopts a vintage, plummy English and brings a certain gravitas to the role.

Once we reach Earth, there are some cute scenes as young Clark’s powers (X-ray vision, laser eyes) make themselves suddenly apparent at school. But predictably, since we all now live in a post-Twilight world, tweenie Kent sees having superpowers through a prism of adolescent angst and largely sulks like Kristen Stewart with a heavy period.

When Henry Cavill is finally established as the main man, it’s like director Zack Snyder has hung out a banner saying: all characterisation ends here. Our hero is a big, blank wall. And things take a further dip when Lois Lane (Amy Adams) hits the scene.

As any fule kno, the playful chemistry between Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder pretty much made the original two Superman movies, but here there’s just a vacuum. Every 15 minutes or so, the odd couple are implausibly plonked next to each other so they can go a bit puppy-eyed, but there’s no context, no sense of spark, in fact no actual time for them to make any connection. No sooner do they start mumbling than BOOM…here comes another setpiece!

Their inevitable locking of lips at the end is the least successful cinematic kiss since Andie MacDowell – the Helen Keller of modern acting – had her rain-soaked smooch with Hugh Grant at the end of Four Weddings and a Funeral. (“Is it raining? I hadn’t noticed.” she chirruped. Well, you wouldn’t. You’re basically made of wood.)

Kevin Costner: Man Of Stolid

Director Zack Snyder throws a few big names into the mix in a vain attempt to add substance. Kevin Costner (look under ‘stolid’ in the dictionary and you’ll see him) puts in a stolid performance as Pa Kent. Big Lol Fishburne gamely cameos as the Daily Planet editor, both acting up and breathing in. But neither of them make much of an impression.

Michael Shannon (playing General Zod) has little to do but scowl and spit like a panto dame. And given he’s usually picking up a truck or punching through a building when he speaks, for a good 50 per cent of the time that’s not actually him you’re looking at. Only Snyder would hire one of America’s finest character actors then use a crap CGI version for half his lines.

In fact, Snyder’s boundless fascination with CGI is a big part of why this movie stinks so badly. It was fine for stuff like 300 and Sucker Punch, which were essentially computer games that somehow found their way into a cinema.

But now that he’s finally got the huge budget, the real actors, the opportunity to make a truly memorable film, what does he do? Piss CGI all over everything. He’s like the ugly single bloke who, finally finding a girlfriend, still keeps running home to dry-hump his trusty blow-up doll. It’s all he knows.

And talking of solitary pleasures that we’re all a little ashamed of, there is at least the helicopter scene to enjoy. Superman is in a small, desert town fighting Zod’s hench-baddies – the woman and the big thug. Big thug throws a truck that bashes the back rotors off a chopper, but Super Henry catches the falling pilot as it explodes. Then a second chopper gets hit. Things look potentially explosive for a moment! But, no. This one is carrying a senior army guy who has quite a few lines, so it naturally hits the floor with a soft bump with just a few rotor blades snapping off.

Artistic merit

Precious little. The whole scene is heavy with Snyder’s usual rat-a-tat editing style, and blurred images flash before the viewer at fit-inducing speed. This is clearly meant to convey a sense of frenzied excitement but, as always with such scenes, it’s merely trying to disguise the fact that most CGI still isn’t very convincing.

Exploding helicopter innovation

Having an artfully thrown truck ripping the arse-end off a chopper isn’t a bad idea, but the second crash is just dull. Perhaps it’s time to call a moratorium on the whole damaged-helicopter-teetering-slowly-to-the-ground-and-remaining-intact device (which only ever happens when named characters are on board). It’s getting sorely overplayed now.

Positives

Amy Adams: arriving again for no good reason

One of the chief joys of any Snyder movie is always the unintentional laugh. In Man of Steel, it chiefly comes from the growing improbability of Superman’s encounters with Lois. Having constructed a movie that is basically a series of huge action set pieces (no Superman Returns-style navel-gazing here), there are few natural-looking ways for Superman to bump into his lady. But hey, who needs natural?

Snyder simply plonks Lois bang in the middle of successive scenes with an admirable disregard for continuity or verisimilitude. (For example, when Supes finds the Fortress of Solitude, who do you think also happens to have popped by?)

Still, the best is saved till last. After the climactic Superman-Zod slamdown, which totals most of an entire city (we’re talking collapsing skyscrapers and square miles of battle-blasted wasteland here) she just pops up out of nowhere in time for a snog. How? From where? A strong suspicion has to be that Snyder had reasoned (correctly) that, by this point, no-one would much care.

Negatives

Hollywood rule #1: Cute dogs don't die

Kevin Costner’s death scene is so hackneyed and abysmal, it prompted a horrible sound in the auditorium as three hundred people spontaneously heaved and then had to swallow a little bit of sick. A huge twister is approaching, so the Kent family leave their car and race for cover under a bridge. But oh, no – they’ve forgotten the dog!

Despite the fact that Clark – even without his powers – is much younger and faster, Big Kev insists on lumbering back over to successfully free the dog (Hollywood Rule Number One: Cute dogs don’t die). But then, d’oh! He gets his foot stuck in the car, in a manner that only ever occurs in movies when danger is approaching. (Seriously, how does one get a foot ‘trapped’ in a space that can comfortably accommodate three people?)

What a dilemma! Clark can save Pops, but only by revealing his powers. As Clark ‘emotes’ helplessly, Dad looks at him with what can only be called a stolid earnestness and somberly shakes his head. Then is consumed by the raging twister.

Don’t you see? Dad had to die to preserve Clark’s secret. Or perhaps Clark could have just jogged over to the car much earlier and freed the dog without wrapping his leg up in a seat belt, while there was still plenty of time. What utter cock.

Interesting fact

Yards of press coverage has focussed on Henry Cavill’s punishing exercise regime for the role, but poor Henry here shows the thin line between incredibly buff and bodybuilder freakish. Put simply, he has actual muscle tits. In one early scene, when – wearing a scruffy beard – he bounds topless across the screen, breasts heaving, he looks like no-one more than Kenny Everett playing Cupid Stunt. Though obviously, it’s all done in the best possible taste.

Review by: Chopper