Superman Returns, 2006. Directed by Bryan Singer, written by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. Starring a cast of undead that includes Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, the usually inspired Kevin Spacey, Frank Langella, James Marsden, Parker Posey, Sam Huntington, and, briefly, Eva Marie Saint and the disembodied voice of Marlon Brando.
What a movie this new Superman could have been: our caped hero’s starship landing in the deserts of Gaza, in war torn Darfur, in the slums of Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro, where some impoverished family raises the boy to right the wrongs of his people. This Superman would find food for the starving, try to see what his x-ray vision could do for the AIDS epidemic, maybe pull the rotting hulks of nuclear warheads from the bottom of the Baltic.
Of course, Superman is only summer popcorn fare, so it’s also a cheap thrill to see the guy pull heroics like, say, single-handedly lift an island the size of Cuba out of the water and hurl it into space. This actually happens. Unfortunately, this Superman also manages to take on the role of a somewhat misguided Christ figure, standing as if on the cross while hanging above the skies. The poor fellow–all he can hear are the cries of the world, begging for a savior!
Somewhere in the glistening halls of the major movie studios, shiny, overly manicured people with lots and lots of income sat around trying to figure out yet another summer blockbuster. Naturally, they turned to the comic books, whose adaptations have become commonplace each and every summer. This year, one of these hacks got it through their head to make this new Superman movie, which is itself not so strange as it was a popular comic, and a successful movie over twenty five years ago. What is strange is that some faceless executive or fanboy director got it through their money-addled head to not only reproduce, for a quarter of the picture, Richard Donner’s utterly mediocre original, with Christopher Reeve. And then, someone decided that it was high time the comic book movie set aside much of the action, focus instead on the intense relationship between Lois Lane and Superman, and in the process make him a figure of almost religious significance.
Freaky. I take that back–freaky would have been the original choice, Nick Cage, mixing in with his earnest crusader a bit of his Peggy Sue Got Married shtick to go with his Oscar-winning drunk, tough guy from The Rock, and maybe even his hang-dog look from Adaptation. No, Superman Returns falls as hard as a Superhero with a stiletto of Kryptonite in his gut.
Superman Returns is long. It is tedious. It is filled with a cast of some of the most bland actors on the planet, including, at its center, a hero so woefully dull that he succeeds in making the tragic Christopher Reeve seem like a beacon of charisma. Kevin Spacey, unbelievably, is unfunny, going through the motions on the way to financing some theater production or art-house flick. Parker Posey is wasted in a role that demands that she do nothing more than whine, and I have to say I’ve seen her whine more professionally in other films. Frank Langella keeps his voice low, bizarre considering he’s supposed to be the boisterous editor of the Daily Planet, not a head librarian. There are other characters, but they, too, are filled with actors and actresses who can hope and pray for roles in syndicated television or Midwestern dinner theater.
There is little plot, and what exists is virtually the same as Richard Donner’s much more spirited original (and let me add that this film also succeeds in making a prime hack like Donner come off as a genius.) In this film, Superman has been gone for five years, off to examine a chunk of the planet that has been discovered floating around in space. He’s a curious boy, eager to see if Krypton holds any secrets about his past. Meanwhile, Lex Luthor (Spacey), has been sprung from prison by a wealthy dowager, a woman he seduced and who dies right off the bat. With her inheritance, Luther quickly invades our hero’s private space, venturing north to roam about the Fortress of Solitude, that great crystal palace where you can find footage of Marlon Brando earning a million dollars for ten minutes–and obviously proving that Brando is burning in hell, forced to see this footage again and again. Luther discovers that the magic crystals from Superman’s home world can be tossed into the drink and make new land! So he takes a handful of dagger-sized pieces and heads back to Gotham (Metropolis? I can’t recall and don’t really care). And what do you suppose he’ll do? Something nefarious, and something involving kryptonite and the end of the world.
And therein lies the inherent problem with Superman: he’s a square, so powerful only kryptonite can stop him, and unless you’re blessed with imaginative screenwriters, the story’s dull. Superman can quite literally do anything, anywhere. He can save kittens from trees, women from mashers, car bombers from roadside cafes, presidents from lying… I guess there are some things even he can’t do. My point is that there’s little surprise in a Superman plot, unless of course you manage to bring some heavies from his home planet, as they did to mild success in the second entry of the original, some twenty years ago. Without that, you have worthless bad guys unable to do anything without the green rock. Unlike Batman, say, who has actual skills (as opposed to powers that vanish with the elements), Superman is either super or he’s a dud. So he’s a normal man on an island of Kryptonite? Well, how is it this beefy guy can’t beat aged Lex Luthor, with or without superpowers? Does it matter? No… because Luthor’s plan, which lacks any wit or irony, is foiled, easily, in ways that only serve to augment Superman’s newfound status as religious icon.
Bryan Singer goes through all the motions: he hauls our hero back to the Daily Planet, where Jimmy Olson wears his bow-tie and is played by a kid who would probably make you ask for a refund at a high school play. Then comes Kate Bosworth, as Lois Lane, a blank slate compared to the madwoman who played her in the original.
Even more confounding, the frustrated romance between Lois and Superman is what drives this film. Superman pines for Lois, who now has a lover, played by James Marsden, who is also the father of their son and another dim bulb. He’s jealous, but supportive. There are long talks between them about her feelings for Superman. Superman, as usual, flies around watching and listening, and pining. Many more references are made to his being a savior, and we get the same scene from the 70s film with Superman carrying the girl around New York City, making us feel like we too can fly. Later, there are more references to Superman’s near-divinity. And then many, many references. We see him in pain hovering above the earth, and later, Superman ends up in the ER, in a scene so embarrassing I still cringe.
Director Bryan Singer obviously looks at Superman as literature of the highest order, and treats it as such. We’re supposed to not only root for the guy, as we did in Spiderman, but worship him as well. But he’s no underdog, and its no longer even a thrill to see the man flying. Richard Donner had a much better sense of Superman’s speed with the crappy effects of ’78. Here, a scene with a crashing plane is tossed in for good measure and it’s utterly lifeless, leaving me wishing Bugs Bunny were on board to use the old air brake joke. At the end of the scene, in which our hero brings the crashing plane down to a ballfield, ends with a joke about how air travel is still safer statistically–a joke told verbatim by Chris Reeve. As are the credits and score. What’s missing is the fun.
It’s difficult to say what went wrong, because everything is wrong in this muddled film, which commits the cardinal sin of being tedious.
Ages ago, the Comics Code Authority did an number on the industry, doing their level best to ‘clean’ it up. They succeeded only in paving the way for uptight squares like Superman to thrive. While the Authority eventually relaxed, in the vacuum it created, superheroes thrived. As the world becomes more complex, we seem to be turning to these simpleminded stories: we’ve seem to have fallen in love with these people (men, usually) who typically don’t work for their abilities, instead getting bitten or mutated or tossed here from other planets. They fight criminals that are nothing like any in real life, in cities that look like fantasies from 1946. The Daily Planet is virtually all white, the cities the same. Here we are today, in an age of CGI, and comic book flicks are so devoid of reality you wonder what their real purpose is (or rather, to what is their purpose real). Is it to keep us in the dark? A simple diversion? There’s nothing wrong with diversions, but Superman tries to take a high road, just as X-Men did, the result being that they’re ostensibly supposed to make you think, and entertain, and ultimately, in Superman, failing miserably to do both. In the press kits, Singer makes many mentions of his love for Donner’s Superman, but he forgets how well that super hero fit into the 70s–Superman was the total square in an era of long-hairs and wide collars, gaping at the new phone booths, rolling his eyes at the hip girl Lois, and trying to fit in, succeeding because he could fly without a hit of acid. Perhaps Singer wants his Superman to do what the last one could not: take us to a time back before the 70s, before 9/11, when evil geniuses like Lex Luthor were easy to destroy, and there truly was Truth, Justice and the American Way. Which didn’t include Iraq, or any other messy truth.
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