‘Superman’ Review: James Gunn Reinvigorates the DC Hero with a Splashy Comic-Book Verve [B]

In 1978, Richard Donner helped Warner Bros. convince audiences that a man could fly with the Christopher Reeve–starring, groundbreakingly successful Superman. Over the 45-plus years since—with wonky direct sequels and reboots both quasi-faithful and abrasively alienating—the character of Superman has largely failed to soar in quite the same way that Donner and his team accomplished decades prior. Now, in 2025, Warner Bros. has hired James Gunn to pull off a more modest but seemingly still remote achievement: to just make a good superhero movie.

It sounds simple, but Warner Bros.’ repeated blunders over the past decade—from trying to emulate the success of Marvel’s interconnected universe with their own wildly inconsistent DCEU—have been highly publicized, proving how quickly and haphazardly Hollywood will operate while straining for relevance. But Superman’s trials on the silver screen have been bumpy for a long time: when Superman IV: The Quest for Peace flopped critically and commercially, it was time to give the character a 20-year rest; when Superman Returns fell slightly below box office expectations, it was time to wipe the slate clean; and when it became clear that DC’s slapdash attempt at a coordinated ecosystem of linked projects—spearheaded by Zack Snyder’s highly revisionist and divisive Man of Steel—was a total bomb, it was once again time to start over.

I always kind of liked the blockbuster classicism of Superman Returns, as well as Snyder’s operatic and often psychotic vision for the character. But Gunn—up to this point the go-to director for B-team superheroes, who cut his teeth on edgelord Troma projects and horror-comedies, and who is now the co-chairman of DC Studios alongside producer Peter Safran—understands the necessary tactic in rebooting this character for the third time this century and kicking off DC’s renewed attempt at a cinematic universe, the DCU (“Drop the E, it’s cleaner,” I imagine some Warner Bros. executive saying). With 2025’s Superman, we cut the fat and drop any extraneous experimentation—no origin story, no extended continuity with other on-screen Supermen, no particularly dour auteurism interrogating the character. True to its simplified title, Superman is back to square one.

To that end, Gunn seizes the opportunity to craft a more recognizably traditional Superman while embracing the modernity of our ubiquitous superhero culture, where sentimental themes of heroism and finding one’s humanity exist within a heightened world of wacky adventure and comic book conflict. If Superman stays largely true to the character’s roots, it’s concurrently more interested in being a vibrant pop blockbuster than a particularly deep treatise on the character himself, happy to use him as a thematic symbol driving a superhero movie that looks to maximize its electric impact. This isn’t your grandparents’ Superman, but it’s also truer in method to his on-page adventures than anything we’ve seen on theater screens thus far.

Contributing to that is Superman’s sense of standalone serialization, as if we’ve dropped in on a big-budget instance of one of the hero’s many escapades. Superman/Kal-El (David Corenswet) is the world-saving alien that, over the three years since he revealed himself, the world has become relatively accustomed to. Within the opening minutes, we’re reacquainted with dynamics both familiar and potentially new to those only abreast of the cinematic interpretations: Superman is our nearly invincible, flying man in the sky, keeping the scourges of Earth in check—which currently means fighting a particularly nasty “metahuman” controlled by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), Superman’s arch-nemesis. The movie already knows you know that, because you’re watching a pervasive American mythos. Shrewdly, Superman understands you don’t need any more elaboration on the fact, nor on that of Superman’s sidekick pup, Krypto—an adorable addition that furthers the film’s animated sensibilities and lets Gunn indulge his proclivity for making heroes out of cute CGI creatures, stemming from his work on the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

You also don’t need any unnecessary embellishment to understand that Superman exists undercover by day as Clark Kent, a reporter at the Daily Planet who dates his coworker Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), who also already knows that Clark is Superman. Gunn’s method of inserting us into an established, lived-in world of implicitly understood character relationships and universe rules gives him the freedom to make this a Superman movie that’s liberated and fun, and not bogged down in extensive mythologizing. Audiences already understand shared universes, so there’s no reason to be confused when other heroes nonchalantly drop in without much fanfare, such as the scrappy B-team of the Justice Gang: a Green Lantern (a superbly dopey Nathan Fillion), Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced).

Gunn’s film respects the audience’s capacity to keep up and roll with the punches, which is exactly what he expects you to do with a boilerplate narrative that nonetheless casually ventures into interdimensional directions that previous films would have felt obligated to build up with extra table-setting. This is as classic a Superman story as you can get: Lex wants to take Superman down, and he goes through every avenue possible to do it (and don’t worry—he’s still trying to develop land). It’s just that here, his methods include unleashing a monstrous kaiju for Superman to fight, as well as the operation of a vast “pocket dimension” that Lex has cultivated into his own speaking militaristic detainment facility and cross-realm experimental warehouse.

Gunn curates the perfect kind of zany playground to let himself loose, similar to the ones he’s exploited in The Suicide Squad and the Guardians films—mixing a sappy emotional core with irreverent humor and visceral action sequences. The film’s impish tone, layered on top of its breakneck set-pieces, will be familiar to fans of those projects. This is a Superman movie, but it’s maybe even more so a James Gunn movie: the character’s base sensibilities are filtered through a roguish filmmaker with an eye for visually distinct, flashy spectacle, here all set amid the vibrancy of broad daylight, with Superman’s vivid blue and red suit shining in the sun while alt rock and power pop play against the flying and fighting. 

That said, you shouldn’t mistake the film’s prioritization of comic indulgence and action exhibition for indifference to Superman’s political context or his tribulations as an interloper on Earth. Corenswet’s Superman is still early in his career of saving the planet—somewhat insecure about his place, but also defensive and quick to get heated about his prioritization of doing the right thing, regardless of how the optics of a unilateral superpower might look. Gunn draws clear parallels to the Palestinian genocide and the Russo-Ukrainian War as Superman inserts himself into an Eastern European clash perpetuated by arms manufacturers to turn a profit, and devotes time to interrogating his place as a benevolent savior when no one else can realistically have a say in his decisions. Lois serves as a foil to Clark’s instincts, with Corenswet and Brosnahan bringing fiery chemistry to two headstrong people trying to make sense of where the old-fashioned altruism of Superman fits into an increasingly polarized world.

It should come as no surprise that this film asserts the value of Superman as a symbol of hope, making explicit the inherent subtext of his plight: a story about an immigrant struggling to adapt to his new home—including attempts by a reckless billionaire industrialist to kill him at all costs. Gunn makes movies about outsiders, after all, and with Superman, he hammers home the fact that America’s most upstanding hero is himself treated as an outcast—Gunn’s heart is so plainly on his sleeve that he writes in dialogue to describe kindness as “punk rock” in all earnestness. Within all of its delirious superhero capers, this is still a film grounded in socially conscious—sometimes heavy-handed—milieus.

The willingness to let these characters exist as fulfillments of archetypes and these broader thematic ideas sometimes robs them of real interiority, and there’s something to be said about this movie as mostly a bombastic piece of junk food. But there’s a satisfaction in a superhero movie that’s happy to be this freewheeling and ludicrous. Despite the burden it carries of being the hopeful jumping-off point for a rejuvenated media franchise—continuing as early as next year with Supergirl and Clayface—it holds onto a contained sense of pluck and independence, content to exist on its own terms and as the product of a distinct creative voice. Marvel already proved that extended cinematic universes are commercially viable. Amid their recent struggling, the ball is in DC’s court to prove that the next real step forward for the superhero genre is films made not by studio executives and focus-grouping, but by artists with a point-of-view.

Grade: B

Warner Bros will release Superman only in theaters and IMAX on July 11.