What if Superman didn’t turn out to be a nice guy? If his powers made him a monster instead of a superhero?

That’s basically the premise behind BRIGHTBURN (2019), the new horror superhero movie—is there even such a thing? I guess there is now— that asks the question: if you discovered the baby you always wanted in the woods, how long would you turn a blind eye on his murderous shenanigans in the name of love? In this movie, a bit too long.

Now, this movie is not about Superman. The Man of Steel is not in this film, but the two origin stories share obvious similarities.

Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle Breyer (David Denman) are struggling to have a baby, but one night, their prayers are answered, as something crash lands outside their farmhouse, and there they discover a baby boy which they decide to adopt as their own. The story jumps to a decade later where young Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn) is celebrating his 12th birthday.

These are unsettling times for Brandon. He’s in middle school, going through puberty, and he’s hearing voices in his head from the ship hidden beneath his parents’ barn telling him to take on the world. In short, he’s an angry little tyke, and in this film he unleashes his anger by hurting people he deems as threat in horrific ways that include glass shards to the eye, breaking a young girl’s hand, and dropping a car to the ground in order to shatter the driver’s face. Yup, it’s a horror movie.

Brandon’s parents want to love their son, but eventually they realize they had better do something about him— you think???— but by the time they decide to take action, it may be too late.

I enjoyed BRIGHTBURN well enough, but not as much as I wanted to. The two main knocks for me against this film are that 1) it’s very predictable, and 2) there’s not a whole lot of imagination behind it.

Once the story is introduced, it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen. You know that Brandon is bad news, and the plot unfolds in ways that offer no surprises. The screenplay by Brian and Mark Gunn offers little in the way of imagination, which is too bad because there were a lot of creative directions this one could have taken, but it doesn’t.

A scene early on in the movie where Brandon is in a science class features a discussion of bees and wasps in which it’s said that wasps are so ruthlessly busy they enslave others to raise their young, hinting of course that this may be the rationale behind Brandon’s real otherworldly parents. This notion had the potential to be something really sinister, but the film never returns to it. We learn absolutely nothing about Brandon’s real parents or where he came from.

When Brandon gives in to his evil ways, he wears a mask. Why? It’s not clearly explained and seems to be a thin excuse to tie this tale in to the superhero motif.

It also takes his parents forever to do anything about their son. They wait so long it strains credulity.

BRIGHTBURN is also another of those origin stories that gives its audience 85 minutes of mundane storytelling, only to offer much more imaginative ideas in the final 5 minutes, as if to say, this is what we have in store for you in the sequel. BRIGHTBURN would have been a better movie if some of what is shown in the last five minutes had happened midway through the film.

Director David Yarovesky tries hard to have the film earn its R rating with some graphic shots of facial mutilation, but sadly, this doesn’t really make much of an impact. There really aren’t a whole lot of memorable scenes or images in BRIGHTBURN. It’s all rather flat.

Elizabeth Banks is fine as mommy Tori Breyer. She’s hell-bent on defending her son to the last, and at times it almost seems as though she’d be okay with her son being an evil monster, but the film doesn’t take things that far.

Likewise David Denman is okay as daddy Kyle. And his big dramatic scene where he decides that enough is enough, and he takes Brandon deep into the woods to hunt, where he plans to shoot his son, is symptomatic of what’s wrong with BRIGHTBURN. On its surface, it’s a fairly dramatic and watchable sequence, but it’s not riveting, we don’t see Kyle in anguish over this decision, nor do we see him in impassioned rage that he has to save the world from his son. Nope. It’s just sort of there.

That’s how the whole movie is. It’s watchable, but it’s just sort of there.

Jackson A. Dunn is sufficiently creepy as Brandon, but that’s about it. We never really learn what Brandon is really about, nor do we know what’s going through his mind in most of his scenes.

Matt Jones, who played Badger on BREAKING BAD (2008-2013), enjoys a few lively and humorous moments in a small role as Brandon’s uncle Noah.

For a brief while, BRIGHTBURN was almost the perfect metaphor for middle school angst, both for the student and the student’s parents, but the film simply isn’t creative enough to sustain such symbolism.

BRIGHTBURN is an okay movie. It’s a horror movie because its main character can and does kill people with ease and in horrific ways, but it’s not scary nor even suspenseful. It’s a superhero movie in appearance only, as Brandon dons a mask and flies around, and of courses possesses super powers. But there’s no depth here, no conversations about the responsibilities that go with great power, no human interactions which shape Brandon’s world outlook. There’s just anger, aggression, and murder, and from a protagonist we know little about.

And we know nothing of Brandon’s otherworldly parents, but based on his actions in this movie, I’m guessing they’re more like the Predator species than Jor El.

There’ll be no inspirational daddy videos at the Fortress of Solitude here.

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