Brightburn Fizzles Out Before It Can Reach Its Fullest Potential

Over in Brightburn, Kansas, life is relatively peaceful enough. Kids go to school, parents go to work and Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn), son of Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle (David Denman), is a seemingly normal Middle Schooler. Except, well, he's not normal. Now, really, nobody is "normal", but Brandon is especially abnormal. His parents have concealed his true origins, which tie into his superhuman strength as well as why he's so attracted to some strange machine located in the Breyer family barn. Realizing he's far more powerful than he ever imagined, Breyer begins to revel in his powers by committing a series of murders around his hometown, which won't remain peaceful for very long now that Brandon A.K.A. Brightburn has come around.



The marketing for Brightburn has made it look like a slightly murderous version of Man of Steel, specifically in providing imagery and music meant to echo the portions of that 2013 movie focusing on Clark Kent's time in Smallville. Brightburn certainly owes more than a touch of influence to the Superman mythos and the Man of Steel influence is felt in a handful of shots, story elements and especially in the tone and music used in a critical scene where Tori comes clean to Brandon about where he actually came from. However, most of that is surface-level details put on top of your usual possessed child horror movie, and as far as those features go, Brightburn certainly has its fair share of moments.

In fact, Brightburn is better than expected in a number of respects, particularly in the over-the-top kills that Brandon dishes out to people. Just as Superman's superpowers are immensely over-the-top, so too is the carnage that Brandon delivers. Jaws dangle from people's heads, one guy gets his brains literally blasted out and a lady gets glass stuck in her eye in the most squirm-inducing scene of the movie. Brightburn plays things too overtly on who is evil to ever really have a creeping sense of terror, little of the movie is actually scary in a way that lasts with you. That having been said, the big death and injury scenes at least do deliver on getting the viewer to immediately recoil back and go "OH NO!!!"

Such moments stand out as a highlight of the script by screenwriters Mark Gunn and Brian Gunn, a pair of writers who keep the proceedings moving at a decent clip in terms of pacing. Initial scenes showing Tori dismissing understandable concerns from other parents about the behavior of her son also stand out as potentially interesting commentary on how general society shields disturbed young white boys from the consequences of their actions due to a "boys will be boys" mentality, usually, as seen in Brightburn, at the expense of marginalized individuals. However, the longer Brightburn goes on, the more the script loses such an intriguing lens to filter a dark version of the Superman mythos through and that's not the only promising part of the feature that goes away once we reach the climax.

One trait Brightburn shares with a number of its far more expensive modern-day blockbuster brethren is a third-act that jettisons any distinctive traits established previously in the runtime in favor of a generic CGI-laden duel that could have occurred in any movie. Any of the potential thought-provoking ideas Brightburn has been toying with as well as the implications of its setting (where Brandon is surrounded by a casual attitude towards violence even before he gets superpowers) and the personalities of the characters just go away so that Elizabeth Banks can be hunted down by Brandon's supervillain form. There's little to engage with here dramatically and the horror & action elements aren't strong enough to make the lack of depth forgivable.

To boot, the finale caps things off on an abrupt fashion that retroactively makes the proceeding film weaker. Brightburn is missing a crucial piece of the puzzle that can take the first 2/3 of its premise to somewhere interesting instead of just fizzling out. Despite starting out with so much potential, Brightburn ends up settling for just being a movie where a bunch of gruesome things happened to some Kansas denizens over the course of a few days. Admittedly, Brightburn goes through that more ordinary movie with some decent flashes of filmmaking from director David Yarovesky and some memorably gruesome moments, but it's all in service of something that leaves you feeling empty rather than unnerved.