This one is likely going to get overlooked at the box office, and that’s a shame because it’s quite good. It’s not great, but it’s good. The weaknesses are all in the screenplay. And they are the most frustrating kind of weaknesses, because they could have been so easily fixed. The kid turned evil too quickly. We should have seen more of a transition period, where he was struggling with himself, the morality instilled in him by his farm boy upbringing giving way incrementally to his dark side. Or if what the creators were going for was more a case of possession, the kid being controlled and manipulated by the alien spacecraft hidden out in the barn, this wasn’t adequately explained. Likewise, the decision of the loving parents to try to kill their own son happened too fast. We got to see no wrestling with the decision, no internal conflict. Also, the filmmakers could have taken even more advantage of that R rating. A 12-year-old kid doesn’t have the moral restraint of an adult, and for such a kid to then be given invulnerability and the powers of a god, once he gives in to his sinister inclinations, there would likely be nothing he wouldn’t do. Knowing there is nothing at all that anybody could do to him, a boy just hitting puberty is presented the whole world on a silver plate, and all he does is pay a creepy nighttime visit to the girl he’s crushing on? He would have believably done much worse.
All this being said, what *is* shown onscreen is terrific. What if Superman was evil? Such an obvious and at the same time ferociously novel concept. BRIGHTBURN gives us a good, albeit incomplete, answer to that question. And it is scary as hell to contemplate. I wish the movie had contemplated it a bit more. My grade: a good solid B.