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.

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.