Rating: 2 stars

I suppose when you film a nihilistic and profane graphic novel about morally ambiguous super heroes in a dystopian alternate universe, you have an obligation to the novel’s hardcore fans. After all, they’re your guaranteed audience, the only ones invested enough in the material to show up no matter what. But here’s the problem with that logic: The readership for The Watchmen may be sizeable, but they would amount to a mere gnat on Spiderman’s spinneret, relatively speaking. Those cult fans alone ain’t going to move the box office needle.
So you could attempt to make the adaptation more tame, less dense with mythology, less pornographically violent, and more user-friendly. Whoa, boy—then you’re really in trouble. Pissed off fans and a watered down product. Not exactly a recipe for success.
So director Zack Snyder, the blockbuster wunderkind behind the hyper-stylized (and soul-dead) 300, chose the only route he could—talmudic faithfulness to the novels—with predictably shaky results. Maybe The Watchmen fanboys will love this movie—although the fact that the graphic novel’s creator Alan Moore has disowned the project can’t be a good sign—but it sure as heck didn’t do it for me.
Imagine all the solemn pretentiousness of The Dark Knight, without Heath Ledger’s addictively loopy performance at its center and you have some idea of what a turgid affair this is.
The year is 1985—sort of—but Richard Nixon is still in office and, thanks to a radioactively blue and naked superhero (he’s blue all over, if you catch my drift) named Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) we’ve won the Vietnam War. In a world controlled by Cold War fear, the populace has less use for a band of vigilante, self-styled Superheroes named The Watchmen. There’s a threat against The Watchmen, the imminence of nuclear war, and lots of unending meditations on the true nature of mankind. (The film clocks in at an unforgivable two hours and 40 minutes.)
It has its moments of visual flair, but for the most part, it’s boring, it’s juvenile—kitsch that thinks it’s high art. Many have called Moore’s graphic novel series “unfilmable”—The Watchmen certainly makes no argument to the contrary.

To read my complete review, check out the April issue of Baltimore.