David Corenswet's slightly puppyish Superman radiates a joy in what he's doing, but he’s far from invincible. That lends the film emotional stakes.

A man deemed an “alien” has his face crushed into the pavement by a masked thug. He’s then renditioned to a top-secret black site prison where he’s tortured. No, these aren’t images from today’s news — it’s from James Gunn’s new take on “Superman.

Writer-director James Gunn’s “Superman” was always going to be a strange chemistry of filmmaker and material. Gunn, the mind behind “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “The Suicide Squad,” has reliably drifted toward a B-movie superhero realm populated (usually over-populated) with the lesser-known freaks, oddities and grotesquerie of back-issue comics.

For the last 20 years, the predominant cinematic image of Superman has been one of a Christlike martyr sent to Earth to suffer for the sins of a world he does not belong in and can never fully understand.