Very good, but...

Rating: 8/10 (6 March 2009)

Overall I enjoyed it, but have a few bones to pick with Zack Snyder.
I definitely didn't like Snyder throwing so much of his own sensibilities into the mix. The gratuitous gore & sex cheapened the whole thing for me, when the beauty of the comic is that it never relied on those things (as most others do).
I appreciate you can't tell every part of the Watchmen story in a film, but in a film battling against massive running time the decision to expand the fighting & screwing, whilst pruning back story elements one after the other was really disrespectful to the source material.
"Who cares about Alan Moore's subplots, just give me tits!" seemed to be the attitude. And we got tits. Malin Akerman's. They were nice. Pity the rest of the time it felt like she was reading her lines off cue cards without thinking about what the words meant.
And the fighting was corny! A gang of 20 dudes coming at Dan & Laurie one at a time then flopping on the ground idiotically when punched or kicked, with the occasional graphic injury edited in, was just too much like B grade kung-fu for me.
The goodies bashed up the baddies so easily - there was never any danger or the feeling of anything being at stake - the extra fighting was a waste of screen time, when so many subtle story points were skimmed over too quickly or removed altogether.
Another thing - Doc Manhattan's mouth. If only they put as much effort into animating his mouth movements as they put into animating his jiggling schlong... When the mouth is the only thing moving, the centre of attention on an otherwise expressionless face, the animation needs to be PERFECT. It wasn't. It stood out like dog's balls...
Jeez, this review makes it sound like I hated it - I didn't. I'm just a little disappointed that the ultimate anti-superhero story ended up having a bunch of cheap corny crap creep into it & wasn't given the attention to detail it deserved.
Thankfully the material was strong enough to keep this film out of the toilet. The central concept - a massive disaster uniting feuding superpowers into peace - stayed intact & was well executed.
The exception to my complaint about the dumb fights is the opening scene where the Comedian dies - that was really awesome. Another highlight is the actor that played Rorschach - he absolutely nailed it! His line in prison as he's being taken away after burning that dude with hot oil... Just perfect!
The bulk of the film is really solid. Weigh it all up, average it out & you've got a good movie. What prevents me from describing it as a great movie is that a fuller story could have been told in the several minutes of screen time that Snyder wastes on stupid fights, gore & unnecessary sex...
And I'm a filthy bastard who normally loves that stuff! It just doesn't belong in Watchmen.