I intensely disliked Superman Returns, not because it had no characters at all (like the Star Wars prequels, where every single human character acts and speaks in pretty much the same way) but because of what it did to the characters, actors, and iconography. It’s not a bad enough film (although it’s still pretty bad) to be ranked alongside the likes of “Speed 2″ or the prequels. What makes me dislike it as much as I do is that it takes so many things that should have worked on paper, and then sucks the life out of them. Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor? Throw in some terrible acting and direction and a couple of comedy sidekicks, and what should have been “iconic cinema villain” becomes “easily the worst Spacey performance of his career”. Lois Lane is a charmless, ungrateful, whiny little annoyance who leaves her boyfriend (the one likeable character in the entire film) for Superman (who’s now apparently become an absent father who doesn’t care about the problems his own son is going through), who then promptly abandons her AGAIN. Heck, even Superman 3 and 4 couldn’t make me dislike Superman as a character. It took the “reboot” for that to happen.

It’s kinda like those Joe Eszterhas scripts like JAGGED EDGE or BASIC INSTINCT where there’s two plausible solutions to the mystery, and both have so many clues to confirm them that it finally becomes arbitrary which one is the solution; the movie could go either way and it wouldn’t matter. Only MY BLOODY VALENTINE has a little fun acknowledging its own absurdity, and builds to that great moment where the one guy gives up and tells her to just shoot both of them.

I gotta say, having watched this purely on DVD, that I HATED this movie. I didn’t get the full 3D experience but to me it was the anti-Juno, in that I hated practically every character in it except the ones who were there purely as slash-fodder. The only two suspects were so unlikeable and devoid of interesting character traits that I really didn’t care which of them it was (they reverse the original film’s solution, if anybody’s interested). The kills were boring and repetitive, the setting was badly portrayed (I live in a mining town, this one looks like about as real as a Hollywood set with the plywood backing boards still in place) and the script was terrible. The solution to the “mystery”, if one could call it that since it’s evident from the opening who the killer is, could have been deduced by the investigator in five minutes flat if he’d only asked the chief suspect one obvious question after the first kill instead of staring him down and not actually asking him anything like he’s Al Pacino from “Heat” (a much better movie) or something. This would shorten the film (I won’t say “ruin” it, this thing is way past ruining) so, to keep it feature length, they have characters who shouldn’t be idiots act in mind-bogglingly stupid ways.

Plus the least likeable female character in the film is the one we’re supposed to “sympathize” with. At one point she is in a scene with her husband’s pregnant mistress, and during this conversation, the killer turns up. The mistress is possibly the only character in the film to pass for “likeable”, so naturally she’s killed off while the “heroine”, who does nothing smart or appealing in the entire movie, ends up surviving. This is obvious, predictable, cynical, and unpleasant. There is no humor or self-awareness in this film. It is not tongue-in-cheek. It never rises to the level of “so bad it’s worth watching just to laugh at it”.

Seriously guys, I try to avoid bad movies so I’ve missed a lot of stinkers, but of the movies I’ve seen, this one would easily be on my top ten worst movies of the decade. Yes, it’s worse than “Superman Returns”. Worse than any of the “Star Wars” prequels. Worse than “Speed 2″. Worse than “Cursed”. Worse than “Transformers”. I detested the first “My Bloody Valentine” and sought this one out only to see if it had improved on the original. (If you’re going to remake a film, remake a really really bad one that had unfulfilled potential.) Somehow it’s managed to make me look on the original “My Bloody Valentine” with nostalgia, which is quite an achievement.

Also, I thought “Jason X” was a riot of laughs, and would never have guessed that the two films are written by the same person. How the guy got from that minor masterpiece of cheesy tongue-in-cheek humor and jump-scares, to this crap, I don’t understand at all.