Superman: Unbound.

Been a while since I've talked about one of the DC Animated Movies, huh? Been a while since I've talked about anything...

Unbound is an adaptation of 2008s Superman storyline, 'Brainiac', which functioned as both a sort of revised origin for Superman and lead into a long and epic Superman story, it's great and you should read it. The movie? Eh...

Poor pacing in general makes Unbound a very difficult movie to talk about or even review, because I could probably write a lengthy criticism on every scene but so much is just...there and ends up amounting to so little that most of it isn't worth talking about. Each of Unbound's central four characters all appear to be existing in separate films, you can increase that number if you talk about the different tones and topics we get when characters crossover and with so much crap smashed into only an hour and fifteen minutes almost none of it gets to mean anything, so it almost feels like nothing has happened at all. And before someone tells me that is how stories work, the way this is edited makes it feel like a seventy five minute trailer for a TV series that doesn't exist.

You've got the weird sitcom with Superman as he tries to hold his relationship together and look after Kara, you've got Kara dealing with her teenage hormones and trying to establish herself as a hero in her own right even if she doesn't quite know what that means yet, you've got Lois being honestly a bit more of a brat than Kara is (and she is the teenager) as she goes around getting herself in trouble and being a dick to Clark for no real reason and finally you've got Brainiac there battling with his obsession and desire to control. In a wider space this would have worked very well, as we know it does, but here it feels erratic, as at random moments the film will leap from one story to another, usually abruptly with only really Brainiac's version of the film getting any kind of ending. And honestly, I didn't really like very much of what we got glimpses into.

Matt Bomer does a great job voicing Supes and he has great chemistry with the rest of the cast, especially Molly Quinn who voices Supergirl but I thought 'The New Adventures of Superman' sucked and I had no intention to see it play out in animated form. I mean Superman is as badass and loveable as ever here but I just didn't care for really any situation he was rushed through.

Supergirl was a lot more enjoyable, but her version of the film is ridiculously brief and in many senses even more hollow as she is eventually reduced to more of an audience window, than an actual character. I think Molly Quinn deserves her own Supergirl movie, one where Superman takes a back seat and we can explore further her life as a teenager with superpowers, who is trying to work out what it means to be a hero with the naivety that comes before world weariness, this was the most interesting part of the film and amounted to about five minutes of it. 

And despite Brainiac being the only one who really gets a complete story, he is by far the least interesting thing in the movie. I assumed he and Superman were going to get some epic confrontation being that they established he has just as much brain as he does brawn but blink and you'll miss when he was a threat because the film wastes no time at all reducing him to an absolute wimp crying because he's got mud on himself. And even when he isn't being pathetic, he is so bland and generic, you could have just called him 'Bad Guy' and told all of his dialogue through evil laughs. Why are we pushing this guy for the live action films again? 

And Lois? I haven't even got anything to say on her, I hated her characterisation in this so much. I never thought I'd miss Amy Adams portrayal, but here I am. The voice work was fine but she was just a brat and a horrible person, in equal measure.

Unbound is a visual mixed bag, much in the same way with the TV show Earth's Mightiest Heroes (yes I know that was Marvel) it seems they've really cut costs on the actual design and artistry of the movie so they can make the action scenes bigger, but it's just such an ugly movie. Oddly enough probably the best stuff visually is the CG stuff, with Brainiac's ship looking incredibly cool and never out of place being CG in a world of 2D replicated hand drawn animation. 

However the odd thing about the action is despite usually being the main attraction for these sort of films, here the action seemed to be used almost exclusively to pad out the film. There is a lot of action but pretty much none of it has any wider purpose, or purpose at all and as similar action scenes are repeated over and over initial confrontations that seem meaningful are slowly drained of their purpose each time they are repeated. I guess in many senses all this achieves is some kind of amusing irony of how misleading the title turns out to be. 

So do I recommend it? There is a lot to like here, but terrible pacing basically ruins all of it, and leaves Superman: Unbound as a pretty terrible film overall. Although I did really enjoy Bomer's Superman, probably more than Cavill's, and I thought Supergirl's five to ten minutes of story were excellent, Man of Steel basically got everything right that this film got wrong, so why even bother with this ugly, cheap piece of animation?

Think About It!

-Locke

What would you rate, 'Superman: Unbound'?