This is one of those movies that takes a premise of such tremendous promise, and does the absolute worst imaginable job with it. Striving to be at once supervillain origin story, family drama, and horror film, it somehow fails to particularly succeed in any of those departments, save I suppose the latter, where in spite of its interesting approach into the horror genre it ends up being as worthlessly nihilistic as the absolute worst of its type.
Welcome to Brightburn, the latest in the recent line of what is sure to be Donald Trump"s favourite movie of the year. I imagine the pitch would have been something like 'It's the Superman origin story, but he's evil', and that's pretty much it. In the nature vs nurture issue it comes down well and truly on the former side, and while late, late attempts to do something a little more interesting in that department are certainly made, they come too little, too late, and can't really gel with what came before in any meaningful way.
I'm guessing the aspect of this that was considered to be the heart and soul of the whole thing would be the idea of troubled adolescence, the growing pains of puberty, but it's still all made up of extremes too out there with absolutely zero effort put into the detailing of character for anything that happens to be anything other than laughably stupid movie writing.
When you stop for a second and consider that this movie sets itself up by presenting all its characters as a family that have known each other and lived together for 12 years, nothing that anybody does makes any sense. They're all idiot movie cliches whose entire histories together go almost entirely out of the window to serve its idiotic plot, that it apparently thinks is all justified on account of some wasps/bees allusion it throws in early on in one of its few cursory attempts at adding depth to all of the immense stupidity on display.
The cast all do decent work, but neither Elizabeth Banks nor David Denman, Matt Jones, Meredith Hagner, Emmie Hunter, Becky Wahlstrom, Gregory Alan Williams nor Annie Humphrey can do anything to salvage it or make anything about it particularly memorable. At the centre of the whole thing Jackson A. Dunn actually proves really special and seems like a seasoned pro, but it’s nowhere near enough to elevate everything around it. No, in fact the most memorable thing about this movie, as you would expect from any half decent stupid horror film, is its gruesome gore. On that level Brightburn is a very visceral film in all its wrist snapping, eye stabbing, jaw detaching glory, and in its own quiet little way manages to say something vaguely interesting about this otherworldly creatures fascination with human frailty, but it’s nowhere near enough to make this anything more than a triumphantly stupid film that has nowhere near enough details in its little moments to make the big ones work.
