It was frequently cloying, tonally discordant, the somewhat childish and exaggerated comedy annoyed me, and I CAN'T STAND Ryan Gosling. I can't buy him in semi-serious roles, and it's kinda hard to get past that.
I don't know, it was like a movie for stupid people pretending to be a movie for smart people. From what I've read, it wasn't a great adaptation and a lot of the more complex problem solving and characterisation from the book were stripped away to make it more of a kids' movie. I can believe that.
So basically, glob all the negative reviews together and that's what I think of it.
There's also something fundamental about it that I really disliked, and I'm having a hard time articulating it. There's a point of view in some quarters that superhero movies are evil, because they portray massive problems being brought about and then solved by supernatural or preternatural forces, and condition us to believe that normal people are not agents of change. That they make people more passive in some subtle way. I don't know whether that's valid or not, though it's probably naive to assume that the bazillion capeshit movies that have been released over the past couple of decades have had absolutely no psychological impact on anyone. You could apply this to hollywood generally, but that's a whole other discussion!
That's not exactly the sentiment this movie made me think of, but it's something similar. It was just such a strange kind of fantasy where nobody was a real human being, and everything works out in the end even though it abso-fucking-lutely shouldn't have and I didn't expect it to. It was like it wanted to infantilise its audience.
Blah blah.
