Reviews - Man of Steel (2013)

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Country: USA, Canada, UK

Genres: Action, Adventure, Fantasy

Writers: David S. Goyer, Christopher Nolan, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, ...

Stars: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Diane Lane, ...

A young boy learns that he has extraordinary powers and is not of this Earth. As a young man, he journeys to discover where he came from and what he was sent here to do. But the hero in him must emerge if he is to save the world from annihilation and become the symbol of hope for all mankind.

100 | 2013-06-13 | Steve Persall

Man of Steel is more than just Avengers-sized escapism; it's an artistic introduction to a movie superhero we only thought we knew.

87 | 2013-06-10 | Matt Patches

If the word “epic” has lost its meaning in the throes of recent summers, Man of Steel forcefully redefines it.

80 | 2013-06-10 | Dave Calhoun

Feels both modern and traditional – a halfway house between the broodier Nolan way of shaking things up and the louder, bone-crunching style that director Zack Snyder established with films such as ‘300’ and ‘Sucker Punch’. Man of Steel is punchy, engaging and fun, even if it slips into a final 45 minutes of explosions and fights during which reason starts to vanish and the science gets muddy.

80 | 2013-06-10 | Dan Jolin

It aches for more depth and warmth and humour, but this is spectacular sci-fi — huge, operatic, melodramatic, impressive. It feels the right Superman origin story for our era, and teases what would be a welcome new superfranchise.

80 | 2013-06-10 | Matthew Leyland

A bracing attempt to bring the legend back into contention that successfully separates itself from other Super-movies but misses some of their warmth and charm. But given the craft and class, this could be the start of something special

75 | 2013-06-14 | Matt Zoller Seitz

The most striking and curious aspect of Man of Steel is the way it minimizes and even shuts out women.

75 | 2013-06-13 | Lawrence Toppman

David Goyer, who wrote the script for Man of Steel from a story he concocted with Christopher Nolan, found a new way to make us care: The title character is disturbed by everything in his adopted home.

75 | 2013-06-13 | James Berardinelli

Man of Steel is, first and foremost, a great spectacle.

75 | 2013-06-13 | Peter Travers

Caught in the slipstream between action and angst, Man of Steel is a bumpy ride for sure. But there's no way to stay blind to its wonders.

75 | 2013-06-12

This is a pretty good action movie that justifies bringing back the Superman franchise -- a dubious proposition to begin with -- by taking the plight of the superhero seriously. Henry Cavill is charismatic in the lead role, Amy Adams is an ideal Lois Lane and, as the villain, Michael Shannon does the best Michael Shannon impersonation you've ever seen.

75 | 2013-06-10 | Lou Lumenick

Deploying an impeccable American accent, Brit Henry Cavill may be as charming as the late great Christopher Reeve.

75 | 2013-06-10 | Charlie Schmidlin

Goyer and Nolan have crafted in Man of Steel a taut, exploratory vision, and Snyder's later inheritance of the material indeed proves his best work since “Dawn of the Dead.”

70 | 2013-06-12 | Richard Corliss

The action is plentiful and thumping; Marvel-size thrills await you and the generations of kids who still believe in Superman. I just mean that the movie finds its true, lofty footing not when it displays Kal-El’s extraordinary powers but when it dramatizes Clark Kent’s roiling humanity. The super part of Man of Steel is just O.K.; but the man part is super.

70 | 2013-06-12 | Bill Goodykoontz

If you like your summer-movie explosions huge, Man of Steel delivers. But it seems as if it might have delivered even more than a glorious noise.

70 | 2013-06-10 | Todd McCarthy

As much spectacle and action — minute-by-minute, frame-by-frame — as any movie anyone could think of. Zack Snyder’s huge, backstory-heavy extravaganza is a rehab job that perhaps didn’t cry out to be done but proves so overwhelmingly insistent in its size and strength that it’s hard not to give in.

67 | 2013-06-12 | Kimberley Jones

Snyder has cast Man of Steel with dramatic actors, not action stars, and it pays off.

63 | 2013-06-13 | Liam Lacey

Here are a few adjectives that do not apply to the new Superman movie: Beguiling. Frisky. Nuanced. Quiet. Even the title, Man of Steel, sounds too flighty for this film. Man of Lead, or Man of Plutonium, maybe.

63 | 2013-06-12 | Claudia Puig

The story, while sometimes soaring, is other times grounded by a hyperactive and numbing vibe. But Henry Cavill has the strapping good looks of the comic icon, and humanity to match his superheroism.

63 | 2013-06-12 | Michael Phillips

Snyder films the violence in Man of Steel the way he films most of the rest of the picture: Like a man chasing tornadoes and not even trying to keep subjects in frame. It's a choice, and not a bad one, necessarily — the Smallville farm scenes, in particular, respond well to the approach — but by the end it's a visually limiting one.

63 | 2013-06-12 | Ty Burr

Snyder knows how to put on a show, and Man of Steel has a massive scope that’s hard to resist... But what’s missing from this Superman saga is a sense of lightness, of pop joy.

60 | 2013-06-14 | Glen Weldon

What it fails to supply much of — surprisingly, it must be said — is fun. This is serious business, Snyder seems always to be saying. This is badass. And given the sheer logistical size of the spectacle on display, it's a position that's hard to argue with.

60 | 2013-06-13 | Manohla Dargis

At once frantically overblown and beautifully filigreed, Man of Steel will turn on everyone it doesn’t turn off.

60 | 2013-06-11 | Joe Neumaier

The serious-minded result has many super-cool moments. But when it gets clunky, it’s super-meh.

60 | 2013-06-11 | Tim Robey

It has heft, it looks amazing, and it's businesslike to a fault.

60 | 2013-06-10 | Stephanie Zacharek

It’s a relief just to watch the actors act once in a while, and thankfully, Snyder is astute enough to punch some breathing holes in this steel-clad colossus.

60 | 2013-06-10 | Andrew Pulver

The whole film ends up feeling weighed down: though Man of Steel bounds from one epic setpiece to another, you're left with the nagging feeling that you just can't work out what the central twosome see in each other. And for Superman and Lois Lane, that's hardly ideal.

58 | 2013-06-12 | Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Like Snyder’s Sucker Punch, it’s a confused but fascinating mishmash of religious, military, and sexual imagery.

58 | 2013-06-10 | Eric Kohn

While certainly the most dazzling Superman movie to hit the big screen, the 143-minute Man of Steel is also the longest, and it only justifies that heft because it leaves room to keep the effects coming.

50 | 2013-06-13 | Dana Stevens

If this version of Superman is to have a future — as Warner Brothers seems convinced he will, having already green-lit the sequel — I hope Snyder will dial back both the casualty count and the Krypton mythmaking and instead focus on establishing a fictional Earth that’s rich enough to be worth saving.

50 | 2013-06-13 | Peter Rainer

Taking a cue from the “Batman” series, the film is dark and thudding and overlong.

50 | 2013-06-13 | Steven Rea

At least an hour of Man of Steel's excessive running time is devoted to the sort of crash-and-burn, slamming-into-skyscrapers CG fight scenes that we've already seen in "The Avengers" and "Dark Knight," "Iron Man," and "Spider-Man." Man of Steel is just the same old same old.

50 | 2013-06-13 | Rene Rodriguez

What went wrong with Man of Steel? The early teasers promised Terrence Malick. The finished film is more Michael Bay.

50 | 2013-06-12 | Kenneth Turan

While its ambition and scope pull one way, its pinched and unconvincing sense of drama pull the other.

50 | 2013-06-12 | David Edelstein

The movie isn’t dead on arrival, like Snyder’s over-reverent "Watchmen." But it’s pleasure-free.

50 | 2013-06-12 | Marc Mohan

Man of Steel has too many characters and too much plot, resulting in a movie that feels overstuffed and overlong.

50 | 2013-06-12 | Roger Moore

If every generation gets the Superman it deserves, Man of Steel suggests we’ve earned one utterly without wit or charm.

50 | 2013-06-11 | Richard Roeper

A mostly underwhelming film, with underdeveloped characters and supercharged fight scenes that drag on forever and offer nothing new in the way of special-effects creativity.

50 | 2013-06-11 | Chris Nashawaty

The local multiplex is lousy with celluloid crime fighters. So what turf is left for good old Clark Kent? That's the nagging question that director Zack Snyder's Man of Steel tries — and ultimately fails — to answer.

50 | 2013-06-11 | Rex Reed

Redundant, unnecessary and a colossal waste of talent and money, you can pretty much sum up Man of Steel in the scene in which a lady police officer watches with her mouth wide open as Superman tosses aside tanks like Tinker Toys. “What are you smiling about, captain?” asks another cop. “Nothing, sir — I just think he’s hot.”

40 | 2013-06-13 | Joe Morgenstern

Here's one more studio extravaganza brought down by numbing action and an addiction to generic digital effects.

40 | 2013-06-13 | Mike Scott

So we get no zippy, Tony Stark-flavored one-liners. No comic-relief characters. No nonsense. But that means we also get no up, up and away, either.

40 | 2013-06-13 | Andrew O'Hehir

Despite looking, feeling and (especially) sounding expensive – this is one of the loudest summer spectacles of recent years – Man of Steel is second-tier and third-generation Chris Nolan-flavored neo-superhero material.

40 | 2013-06-11 | Joshua Rothkopf

The better actors — Kevin Costner, chiefly, as the adoptive Earth father — strain to supply warmth, but mostly, the minutes stretch into great expanses of blahness, much of them filled with Transformers-grade skyscraper snapping and bloodless catastrophe.

40 | 2013-06-10 | Scott Foundas

The humorless tone and relentlessly noisy (visually and sonically) aesthetics leave much to be desired.

38 | 2013-06-13 | Joe Williams

A soulless, overblown bore.

38 | 2013-06-12 | Chris Cabin

All its faux-patriotism isn't played for satire, but instead utilized to align the film with an idyllic, unquestioned vision of goodness.

37 | 2013-06-13 | Ann Hornaday

Snyder tries to up the spectacle ante with ever more explosions, crashes, thermal blasts, topological realignments, gunfire and mano-a-mano fistfights. But the result is a punishing sense of diminishing returns and a genre that has finally reached the point of mayhem-induced exhaustion.