Watchmen (2009)

Rating: 3/10 (4 April 2020)

Directed by Zack Snyder. Starring Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Robert Wisden, Laura Mennell, Matt Frewer, Rob LaBelle, Stephen McHattie. (R)
Laggard and lugubrious adaptation of the much admired comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, deemed unfilmable by many (and hard to argue against that belief based on these results). Takes place in a dreary alternate mid-80s reality where superheroes exist, Nixon is still president (and wearing distractingly awful makeup), and nuclear Armageddon is on the brink; plot is convoluted and often discarded for long passages of time to focus on side ventures and back stories, but such is the price to pay for so much slavish, myopic reverence for the source material. Snyder's fascistic pop-art sensibilities seem like a good fit on paper, but paper is where the story should have stayed; though there are occasional eye-popping images, the action is flashy but repetitive and unengaging, the moral pontificating is flatulent, the music cues are ham-fisted, and the pace can best be described as "torpor deco." Only Haley and Morgan leave an impression in the cast (unless you count Crudup's big, blue CGI privates). The point is made early and often, then drags on and on and on (and on) for nearly three hours...but, hey, there's a director's cut out there that adds almost another half hour.
33/100