Screams "Comic Cult!"

Rating: 7/10 (7 February 2014)

Having seen Watchmen twice, I must say it does not improve with age, but it does hold its own.
The film presents a dark urban future, with Nixon in his fourth term in a war-room that looks awfully familiar from "Dr. Strangelove," and sex and death in the streets of America, and in the bars of Vietnam. WW III with Russia over the invasion of Afghanistan is imminent. Against this backdrop, an aging gang of all-too-human superheroes are getting killed one by one because they may be onto the world-salvation plan of one of their own, which has a small hitch: millions must die so billions may live. A familiar theme, also used in the more recent "CA: The Winter Soldier."
The characters are exquisitely drawn, all of them: the main ones, whose formative superhero stories we see in flash-backs. The cameos, like a hilarious Henry Kissinger who looks and talks just too much like the real thing. And the victims - of criminals and of the Watchmen, for in this film EVERYONE is a victim. I have a soft spot for "formation and decay of superhero" stories, so A+ for that.
The film makes great use of songs, and of gratuitous violence, although I don't think it quite rises to the heights of "The Crow" in that genre. But a film whose lead actor is killed for real in a killing scene (it was an accident, nonetheless making the Crow a Hollywood-condoned commercial snuff film) will be hard to beat on that account. I don't even think "Watchmen" has something to beat the cigar cutter scene at the beginning of "Darkman." Still, I had to cringe many times, probably at exactly the times director Zack Snyder wanted me to.
The film is sometimes too heavy-handed - think orgasm and flamethrower. Hitchcock pushed that one to the limit in North by Northwest, and here it went over the limit into corny territory. Some of the character motivations fall apart towards the climax. As the world's best quantum mechanic, surely Dr. Manhattan can see that every single human being, including the evil ones, is a coincidence as special as the love of his life. The film falls short of a masterpiece, but it is darn good.