Overall Rating
  Awesome: 33.7%
Worth A Look: 17.04%
Average: 14.81%
Pretty Bad: 18.89%
Total Crap: 15.56%
13 reviews, 192 user ratings
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| Superman Returns |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Moviegoers don't need a savior. And neither do I."
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We begin with Lex Luthor. Why does he surround himself with idiots Miss Teschmacher and Otis in the original Richard Donner/Richard Lester films, and now Parker Posey as a fashion-victim ditz and various grunting minions? Because, for all his criminal-mastermind preening, he's a second-rate intellect who has to feel smarter than anyone around him. Remember that, because it's the key to why "Superman Returns" may work for some and not for others.After almost twenty years, and about ten years of false starts, director Bryan Singer has rebooted the Superman film franchise with an occasionally rousing but surprisingly sedate and reflective movie. Superman (newcomer Brandon Routh) has been away from Earth for five years poking around the galaxy looking for clues to himself in fragments of his long-dead home planet Krypton and so has his dweeby alter ego Clark Kent. They both return at the same time, though nobody connects the dots, not even fearless reporter Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) or the aforementioned genius of hate Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey).
When a real director (as opposed to a hack-for-hire like Brett Ratner or Tim Story) takes on a comic-book hero Christopher Nolan with Batman, Ang Lee with the Hulk, and Singer with the X-Men and now Superman they generally want to burrow underneath the invulnerable skin and probe the anguished psyche within. When possible, they also want to take the character back to the basics the nucleus, if you will, of the character's appeal in the first place. Some don't like Superman because he's just too perfect, too noble, and too powerful (he gained a ludicrous number of specialized superpowers in the comics over the years before John Byrne did his own reset in 1986 and pared him down). Others see him as an ideal. Bryan Singer bypasses all that and recasts Superman as the ultimate outsider the Last Son of Krypton, to borrow the title of Elliot S. Maggin's 1978 novel. If you discount the various familial detritus of the old comics (Supergirl, Kandor, Krypto the super-dog) there's nobody more alone not even Batman.
Singer brings a satisfying sense of weight and consequence to the big action numbers. The plane rescue is probably going to go down in some kind of set-piece history the tremors of danger, the spike upward into chaos, the tension and release, all suggest Spielberg in his freewheeling prime. Singer's becalmed version of the Superman/Lois night-flight trumps the one in the 1978 original (and benefits from not being marred by that awful Leslie Bricusse "Can You Read My Mind" drivel). Technically, this Superman is firing strong on all levels. The plot threads, however, are the idiots that Singer the mastermind surrounds himself with. Luthor wants to...build his own continent? And kill billions of people in the process? Who's going to be left alive to "pay through the nose" to live on Luthoria, or Otisberg, or whatever he decides to call it? Luthor has been festering in prison for five years and he has nothing more diabolical in mind for his όbernemesis than a kryptonite shiv between the ribs?
The Clockwork Orange-style pummeling of the weakened Superman stings us as it's meant to. Since we know he won't die, though, it's hard to feel alarmed just offended at the indignity. Superman Returns brings up mere-mortal resentment of costumed gods that the movie isn't quite equipped to deal with (besides, Singer already did that to a fare-thee-well in his X-Men movies). A great deal of the final hour feels tethered to a creaky plot, and though Brandon Routh's Superman gets better as the movie goes along more soulful for having tasted his own blood Kate Bosworth's Lois doesn't, and the rest of the cast, including Kevin Spacey off on his own Planet Of Amusing Myself, barely connects with the material.
What recommends the movie are the golden threads of subtext. Singer takes his superhero mythos seriously, though not with the emo pomposity of Batman Begins. Superman has landed in a chaotic world filled with bodies that burst like tomatoes. Yet the people in those bodies live life and get on with things. The world has survived, and moved on, in the wake of Superman's five-year hiatus, though not without tasting its own blood. (Unspoken very loudly is the notion that Superman might've averted 9/11 if he'd been here. There's a nicely judged scene with Clark on Ma Kent's farm numbly scanning the TV news and seeing that things have pretty much gotten worse globally.) Superman Returns is about how the eternal above-it-all loner decides to rejoin the vast, fucked-up, self-destructive human family because of (cue Brando) our capacity for good.Were you expecting Superman to save your summer after one disappointment after another? I wouldn't jump off a dam to see if he'll catch you the movie is solid and emotionally direct but not the concussive powerhouse many will be hoping for. And it has too many cheesy summer-flick narrative beats to be considered anything near great. But if you enjoy subtle moments like Superman using his super-breath to blow out Lois's lighter as much as you enjoy his employing the same power to beat back exploding gas mains, this might be your movie.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14733&reviewer=416
originally posted: 06/28/06 15:45:40
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USA
28-Jun-2006 (PG-13)
DVD: 28-Nov-2006
UK
14-Jul-2006
Australia
29-Jun-2006
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