'Watchmen' review

Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Credit: Clay Enos/Warner Bros.)

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A team of masked, self-made, superpower-free superheroes has hung up their tights and tried to immerse themselves into everyday society after President Nixon orders them to cease their violent vigilante justice. But in 1985 when one of their own, The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is murdered, the team straps on the spandex/metal/etc. and springs back into action. Starring Billy Crudup as the gigantic, blue, mutated physicist Dr. Manhattan (who may or may not be giving people cancer), Malin Akerman as Laurie/Silk Spectre II, Patrick Wilson as Dan/Nite Owl II, Matthew Goode as Adrian/Ozymandias, Carla Gugino as Sally Jupiter and Jackie Earle Haley—in the film's only memorable performance—as Rorschach, the creepiest of the bunch, who growls more than a little like Batman.

The buzz: This is the year's first highly anticipated movie, but it also comes from Zack Snyder, the director of the idiotic and highly stylized upper-body workout video also known as "300." So it's anyone's guess if "Watchmen"—based on the supposedly unfilmable DC Comics graphic novel, which took 20-plus years to adapt, and was only recently freed from legal issues between 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros.—will deliver on the hype and crackle through its gargantuan 162-minute runtime.

The verdict: "Watchmen" is all spectacle and mostly a bore, too clunky to be interesting and too brutal to be fun. (Ruthless actions by The Comedian and Rorschach are indulged instead of analyzed.) The scattered visual highlights can't compensate for Dr. Manhattan's urgency-free monologues or an absurd ethics lesson that's tacked on to the climax. Equally cold and sappy, "Watchmen" has been executed rather than crafted, and again suggests Snyder has no interest in making sense of a world overcome by evil and the heroism that works to stop it. All he's mastered is the sensation of bullets tearing through flesh.

Did you know? Dr. Manhattan duplicates himself so he can still get work done while his copies satisfy his girlfriend Laurie in the sack. And who says cloning is a crime against nature?

Video: Watch Matt's review of 'Watchmen'

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