Superman and We Need To Talk About Kevin get the mashup no one asked for in Brightburn. It’s a distressingly by-numbers thriller about a boy from another planet who crash lands into the lives of his childless parents-to-be and turns their farm in Brightburn, Kansas into a demonic cousin to Smallville. Sex is “not just about organs and body parts,” he tells him, clearly hung up on his little weirdo’s equivalent of a porn stash. Despite the high-concept pitch and those occasional flickers of satire about All-American parenting gone awry, Brightburn fails to deliver anything novel in either genre. Worse still, as an ironic inversion of the superhero origin story, Brightburn is woefully inept, only briefly coming to life in the closing credits, which promise an equally derivative but considerably more entertaining story about what might have happened if Clark Kent decided humans weren’t much worth saving.

Source: National Post May 23, 2019 19:07 UTC