Entertaining -- If You're a 13-Year Old with Serious Anti-Social Tendencies

Rating: 1/10 (5 August 2009)

Goes down as one of the most miserable viewing experiences of my life.
Zack Snyder, the peddler of crap who inflicted "300" on an unsuspecting world three years ago, is at it again, and has made a movie even less watchable than that other one. Snyder's modus operandi as a director would appear to be taking silly material deadly seriously, and he creates pounding, monotonous and -- in the case of "Watchmen" -- disturbingly sadistic films. "300" at least had a camp sensibility, even if unintentionally, that was easy to make fun of. "Watchmen" is just thuddingly boring when it's not being whiny or revolting.
Set in an alternative version of the 1980s, "Watchmen" is about a group of former superheroes who were driven out of service by a public who no longer wanted their help. Though how exactly most of them were superheroes is never clear. Only one, Dr. Manhattan, a big blue cloud of radioactive material with killer abs, has special powers; everyone else is just really good at beating people up. The rest of the plot is nearly impossible for me to summarize, since there's so much of it and almost none of it makes any sense. I imagine only people familiar with the source material could tell you what this movie is actually about. All I know is that half of the film's interminable running time had gone by and I was still waiting for a plot, or even the beginnings of a point, to emerge.
"Watchmen" feels like it was written by an angry 13-year old who thinks it's cool to see the world as a cold and uncaring place but only because he's never known anything but comfort and shelter. It takes a petulant attitude about human nature and tries to convince us that humans are at heart cruel and sadistic. But really, the only person who comes across as sadistic is Snyder himself, whose gratuitous use of graphic violence borders on the pornographic. Snyder needs to understand that intelligent adults understand the impact of violence in the real world, and may not relish the idea of seeing a little girl's severed leg being torn apart by dogs, or the head of the man who killed the little girl hacked apart by a meat cleaver. Moments like these -- and there are far too many of them -- take on a life of their own and remove the viewer from the world of the film. It's very difficult to get back in, especially if the movie's no good to begin with.
The cast of actors, some of them very good in other things, should be embarrassed by the performances they give here, though I'd like to think it's not their fault. Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley and Matthew Goode deliver all of their lines in an expressionless monotone (though Goode deserves points for doing so while looking exactly like David Spade). It falls to Patrick Wilson and the actress who plays Silk Spectre (I'm too lazy to look it up) to give me characters I came even close to caring about. I didn't care about them, really, because they're boring as hell, but they at least seemed to be playing human beings.
One shouldn't have to be familiar with the original graphic novel to appreciate the film -- the film's merits should speak for themselves. Unfortunately, they don't. Message to Zack Snyder: next time try making a movie that WASN'T first a graphic novel, and maybe you'll have better luck. Though somehow I'm doubtful.
Grade: F