Special-K88

It began with superpowered beings known as metahumans, then came an extraterrestrial baby, and now today it's Superman, a Metropolis superhero who for the very first time tastes his own vulnerability and is subjected to much scrutiny following his unsanctioned actions in a Boravian conflict. Despite his best intentions, Superman has to fight an uphill battle to sway the court of public opinion. After leaving an indelible mark with Guardians of the Galaxy and then The Suicide Squad, it was only fitting that James Gunn now got to put his own lighthearted spin on the man of steel; beefcake Corenswet embodies both the earnestness of Clark Kent and the nobility of Superman and sparks with Brosnahan who gives Lois Lane a sharp tongue, meanwhile scheming, bald-headed Hoult gets to bare his teeth as bad seed Lex Luthor. The movie is both charming and vibrant with heavy doses of bombastic action, but also features an excess of childish humor along with overcrowded characters and subplots that disrupt the tone and undermine the tangible chemistry between the two leads. Gunn may be trying to do a bit too much with this one, but there is entertainment value even though it's still not the definitive DC superhero movie. **½

Present day: dinosaurs continue to populate the planet, but reside almost exclusively on a forbidden island in the equatorial region where they thrive, an island that also served as a former research site for InGen and their misguided experimentations. Covert mission specialist aka situational security reactor Johansson, maritime team leader Mahershala Ali, and assorted others (some of whom don't belong) are hired by a high-end pharmaceutical company to procure samples from some living dinosaurs that are vital to a groundbreaking human medical experiment. Supposedly the mission has a high success rate, more or less, but how many guesses does a viewer actually need to discern that things will go awry? Having screenwriter David Koepp back aboard (who co-wrote the first entry in '93, and then flew solo for the second in '97) may create some anticipation for JP loyalists, but the dinos are subordinate to the humans who lull the audience to sleep by gabbing on about evolution, life expectancy, and other disinteresting things. Painfully overlong, with lukewarm action scenes, surprisingly second-rate visuals (do the dinosaurs ever seem real?) and far too many conveniences in the script for characters who make one dumb decision after another. Tries to be a thrilling dinosaur romp and preach a humanitarian message at the same time, but falls flat in both. **

Machines never experience fatigue, but one probably wishes they did after sitting through this misbegotten sequel with a script that makes up overcomplicated reasons to resurrect M3GAN, the most significant being so that she can take down AMELIA, an autonomous military-grade prototype who's gone rogue. Of course Gemma Forrester and her now twelve-year-old niece Cady are back in the mix, still reeling from the fallout of their previous encounter with the rabid robot, add to that the fact that Gemma is now suspected of treasonous activities. A classic case of producers letting their egos go to their heads after the success of an initial film; in this potboiler they evidently believed they had free rein to do whatever they wanted as there's a drastic shift in tone, abandoning all of its predecessor's horror and humor, and instead turning into a doomsday type of action film where by the looks of it, M3GAN is trying to show why she'd be ideally suited to join the IMF! Sluggish, laborious, virtually humorless technological fodder feels so much longer than it is, and poses the bizarre underlying question of whether former 90s action star and Aikido master Steven Seagal was a silent producer on the project. *½