Superman (2025) review

Gunn, the new co-CEO of DC Studios, has (once again) rebooted the Superman franchise, this time replacing Henry Cavill as the lead with David Corenswet and taking a "less serious" approach: here, reporter Clark Kent is in a rocky relationship with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and having trouble battling the advanced foes corporate overlord Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) keeps throwing at him ... and then loses the trust of the public after Luthor releases footage of his biological parents Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan) instructing him to dominate Earth.  Many of the stylistic choices by Gunn are questionable (the extreme close-ups, for example, are cheesy) and, for whatever reason, the production team decided to take the Man of Steel and make him mostly a push-over: until the very last few minutes he is consistently beaten up and requires the assistance of the Justice Gang, his canine companion Krypto and robotic doctors to save him.  It fumbles around trying to be relevant when it comes to current events: there's a war going on between the (fictitious) lands of Boravia and Jarhanpur that require intervention and there's also the topic of Superman being (quite literally) an "illegal alien" (which became a talking point on Faux News) ... although Gunn's too immersed in "fantasy" to truly expound on "reality," which currently has mainly non-violent criminals and their children getting whisked away by masked and armed Gestapo-like cretins.