It looked like they were desperately trying to write the superhero somewhere in their adolescent drama

Rating: 5/10 (24 October 2004)

For me, it was a hard work to sit this film through, after this slow and long opening and all. I know I'm probably just being a smartass or whatever, but I struggled to find something to be interested in.
I mean, there's no much action in it (I hoped to relax and watch a sfx flick - duh! Nowhere near it!), and there's this (IMHO) overwritten personal story that doesn't state much, either (it probably does for what it is: an adolescent movie; but it lacked freshness and therefore was plain DULL).
At last - I found one interesting thing: at about the half of the movie, it suddenly occurred to me that the script writers didn't seemed to LIKE the whole superhero thing at all! Like "oh, well, yeah, I forgot- he's a superhero... OK, let's put an action scene here, what's it that the producer wanted there? The train chase? OK, here you are, now let's get back to the REAL people!" Or something to that extent.
I mean, it looked like they were desperately trying to write the superhero somewhere in their adolescent drama, and I saw this bizarre picture of the whole writers crew jumping on the film roll trying to fit the bloating here and there superhero in, like people do with the traveling bag when there's too much stuff in it.
At the end, I could clearly see two separate movies that mixed about as good as lemon juice and an 85W motor oil. So my conclusion was: they didn't manage to marry the two stories, maybe because they got so far in the realistic part of the first one that the second one looked like it didn't belong.
I understand that it's probably the most difficult part of writing a superhero script, but as difficult as it is - it should be done. I could barely watch the "main theme" of the film, although it struck me that there were some pretty bold secondary characters (say, the landlord's daughter - what a pearl!), and there wasn't much of the action movie, so I got bored.
It probably is a good movie, but if puts me out of the 3 sigmas of the Gaussian distribution of its target category. I enjoyed some parts of it, and I'd give it a solid 4, or not so solid 5 out of 10.