Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

Brightburn

A threesome, a lifetime supply of pizza, and meeting your favorite movie star all sound like clit-ticklingly awesome ideas.  In reality, you can't satisfy one partner, let alone two at a time, so your threesome is destined to make you feel like a worthless piece of shit.  All the pizza you could eat will take your feet after giving you diabetes.  And learning first hand that your idol is as big a fucktard as you are isn't going to do your dickless, feetless ass any favors either.

Taking the standard issue superhero origin story and turning it on its head is an excellent idea.  James "Potato" Gunn took a swing at it when he wrote and directed 2010's Super and didn't fuck it entirely up.  Gunn handed off writing and directing duties to a couple of relatives and a nobody for his production of Brightburn, and the result is the most infuriatingly boring answer ever to the question, "What if Superman wasn't chaotic good?"

People like to bitch that all the best parts of movies are spoiled by the trailers/commercials/previews.  If there were a class devoted to that topic, Brightburn would be its textbook.  The commercials for Brightburn showed a couple in Kansas (of course) finding an alien baby, raising it as their own child, and the kid turning out to be evil.  The commercials also show little Clark Bent terrorizing his mother, so they give away that there's less chance of happy ending than at a Mormon hand-amputee festival.

There's more wasted opportunity on display in Brightburn than at an AA meeting in Harvard Square.  The super tween goes bad overnight because of a voice he hears coming from his spaceship, which his Earth parents keep locked in the barn (fucking morons).  Whose voice is it?  Why is it only now talking?  Why is it urging l'il Brandon to go all supervillainy?  We'll never know.

Wouldn't it have been other-side-of-the-pillow cooler if there was no voice, and the kid wasn't so much pure evil as he was an average, human-like 12-year-old with superpowers.  You can kumbaya all you want, but most prepubescents suddenly handed Superman's toolbox would almost certainly do some heinous shit.  Or what if the voice was just in his head.  Schizophrenic Superman, anyone?

Up, up and no fucking way I ever see this super turd again.

May 31, 2019