Cavill, Costner, Crowe, and Lane can't save this mess

Rating: Null/10 (14 June 2013)

The four captioned actors do a splendid job selling the exposition to an audience who has become very familiar with the legend over the years. Costner in particular has two exceptional scenes with Cavill where we learn that what makes Superman super is not just his powers from Krypton but from what his adopted father has taught him about being a man.
Frankly, other than the first act that these four actors give us, Man of Steel is arguably little better than the last tedious entry into the Superman film franchise. Once Superman is encouraged to 'just be himself' by his Kryptonian father Jor-El, the film very quickly degenerates into a exceptionally boring slug-fest that is more than a little reminiscent of the Transformers films.
And this begs the question, if Superman so values human lives, why does he choose populated areas for his fisticuffs? Entire buildings are destroyed as part of the collateral damage. Why not lure the fight into unpopulated areas or even outer space? Surely, as skyscrapers collapse in the middle of downtown Metropolis, innocent lives are being lost?
But Superman does seem to care very much about saving Lois Lane, played by a very doughy- looking Amy Adams. They quickly go from two people introduced as a matter of circumstance to lovers kissing; strange, as it seems the characters share very few screen minutes together. There is no palpable romantic tension or chemistry between these two characters. Zero.
After about 10 minutes of watching Superman wrestle with a cheap-looking CGI monster, I realized that this film had absolutely very little that was original or inspired about it. It is a quite-frankly desperate attempt by Warner Brothers to resuscitate a much-needed franchise; this film will be a moderate success but that is not good enough. It needed to be at least as good if not better than Batman Begins and this film is not even in the same league as that film, flawed as it was.
In summary, it is a film of a mixed pedigree (Nolan vs. Snyder, one an established artist and the other not so much) that makes a few smart decisions regarding efficiency of exposition but ultimately succumbs to a third act that is astonishingly dull. Newsflash: 15 minutes of characters pounding the hell out of each other is not better entertainment than the same scene condensed into a few minutes.