Review of Brightburn (2019) by Rebecca31 — 01 Jul 2019

I'm as bored writing this review as I was watching the film so feel free to skip to the star rating and avoid this utter nonsense that is Brightburn. For anyone still reading all you need to know about this film is it takes the idea of Superman and flips it on it’s head. What if a child from another world crashlands on earth but instead of being here to save it, he’s here to take it. A great idea but the result is far from great, or even good because that’s all it is. A good idea stretched into a full length film. I didn’t have high hopes for Brightburn but I was expecting better.

A film never comfortably fitting into one particular genre, it plays out very much like Smallville then takes a sharp detour into a horror genre, think predictable child possession movie and all that stuff we’ve seen before. Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle Breyer (David Denman) have been trying to have a baby for some time now and one night their prayers are answered when a baby crashlands in the woods and they decide to raise him as their own. Well as Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn) starts to grow up it becomes apparent he’s no ordinary child. If I can say one positive thing about Brightburn at least it wasn’t afraid to shy away from the violence. It doesn’t go overboard but it’s enough to make you squirm in your seat. It moves from set piece to set piece, there’s nothing surprising and at no point was there any atmosphere, and with only a 90 minute running time I found myself getting quite bored. Now I know there is an audience out there for this movie somewhere because it’s not suffering as much at the box office as I would have expected but if I stopped to ask the six other people in the screen after the credits rolled I’m presuming they were as unimpressed as I was.

Brightburn also suffers from its very own trailer, how many times have I criticized a movie for that? Honestly someone tell me because I’ve lost count at this point. This is a particular problem for horror movies in general, and considering Brightburn fancies itself as a bit of horror it’s fallen into the exact same trap. The film’s scariest scenes have all been shoved into the trailer to bring in the target audience so when you’re sitting there watching it there’s no longer any shock value. You know how a majority of the “scary” scenes will play out because you’ve already seen them. They even managed to throw in a couple of cheap jump scares for good measure. To sum up if you’ve seen the trailer then you’ve seen the movie and you’re probably going to feel pretty annoyed if you paid a full price ticket to see a mediocre Superhero origin horror mashup that has a hard time keeping anyone’s attention. A great idea, poorly executed and not recommended.