Superman Returns
(2006)
review by Big McLargehuge

 

Other potential titles for Superman Returns

I guess I'm spoiled from the last eight years or so of excellent Superman-based entertainment, including the fantastic Superman the Animated Series, Justice League Unlimited (also animated), and ‘Smallville'. So I was sort of baffled when I walked out at the end of the 153 minute-long Superman Returns and thought, "man, did that suck."

And it took me several hours of ranting about losing nearly three hours of my life to a movie that could have been told in one 30 minute cartoon and not lost a single interesting moment. See, the more recent media takes on DC's godlike last son of Krpyton have significantly expanded the back story, universe, villain profile, and angst of old Kal-El. That's all good, very good, and offered Superman that critical third dimension he lacked in past comic form, and in the Salkin/Donner/Lester ‘Superman: The Movie' and ‘Superman 2' (plus the two lousy further sequels).

Bryan Singer, the man who made the X-Men so fantastically complex and compelling, strips away that third dimension from Superman and turns back the clock to the Man of Steel's "Boy Scout Years". Gone is his complex relationship with Lex Luthor. Gone is his worry that he cannot accomplish enough in his role as humanity's guardian. Gone is his panache. Gone is his awe. It's just not there. The script by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris seems more at home in a made for Lifetime movie about unrequited love. It's unusual too that Harris and Dougherty would turn in such a blah script that sticks so close to the Puzo/Benton/Newman script for Superman: The Movie when they had already demonstrated their ability to write well for superheroes.

But alas, what we get in Superman Returns are the lousier parts of Superman: The Movie and Superman 2 combined. This mélange brings us a laughably inane Lex Luthor (Scenery chewing Kevin Spacey) and his non-speaking henchmen (all three of them) and Kitty (Parker Posey, who has, like, five lines in the whole movie), an inherited fortune, and a nearly identical villain plot to the first Superman film. However, this time, instead of nuking the San Andreas Fault and creating oceanfront land in Nevada, he will use stolen crystals from the Fortress of Solitude to create a Kryptonite laden continent in the middle of the Atlantic (or whatever that ocean is called in the DC universe) to sell for real estate.

Seriously, Lex Luthor, the most accomplished Super Villain in the entire comics universe is, AGAIN, reduced to a real estate scam artist.

Amazingly, this plot is secondary to the torturously long and overwrought love triangle between Superman (Brandon Routh), Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), and her fiancé Richard White (James Marsden).

After a five-year journey to explore the ruins of Krypton, Superman returns to Smallville the same way he arrived as a baby; strapped to a Kryptonian meteorite. After recovering from his journey he returns to Metropolis and his old job writing for The Daily Planet under his old secret identity Clark Kent.

But five years is a long time to be gone and people have moved on. Lois is engaged to Richard White (AND she has a kid of questionable lineage), while Luthor was released from jail early because Superman didn't show up as a witness at his trial. Oops.

Superman spends most of the film trying to clumsily mend fences with Lois who is about to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the editorial "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman". Oh! Burn! Of course, her angry diatribe masks lingering love for the man in blue, but her commitment to Richard is such that she won't jeopardize her engagement.

Like we care about this? If I want inane love triangles, I'll read Edith Wharton.

Rammed into this cavalcade of boredom are two action set pieces, an airplane disaster, and a bank robbery. The airplane disaster is the one that is most expected in a film about the Man of Steel, and it's pretty cool to look at so long as you do not think at all about what you are watching. That, or you can consciously imagine that Lois Lane is constructed entirely of Silly Putty so that as she is bounced, literally, from one end of a plummeting Airbus to the other and back again, emerges with not so much as a bruise. Hell, even her hair is in place — unlike everyone else aboard.

This sort of inattention to continuity and, let's face it, reality, snapped me completely from my willing suspension of disbelief.

Parker Posey is stuffed into the Miss Tesmacher role made famous by Valerie Perrine and looks, for the entire film, like she has suffered a massive head injury. And while, exactly like Superman The Movie, her worries about other people prompt her to help Superman in his moment of need, she doesn't even get to earn any pathos points because her character is so poorly drawn she has nothing at all to draw from. While Miss Tesmacher had family in Hackensack , New Jersey (which prompted her to remove the Kryptonite necklace from Superman so he could thwart Luthor's plan) Kitty merely asks if "a billion people will really die?" when Luthor's continental plan comes to fruition. Then, like fifteen hours later, she makes a quiet rebellion that screws Luthor out of his victory.

Or does she? He's pretty much beaten by then anyway. The script sure as hell doesn't make it clear. Maybe it was homage to Miss Tesmacher? And if you remember the Donner film, Superman saves Miss Tesmacher's family first by intercepting the missile headed for the East Coast, which costs the life of Lois Lane on the west. It's a goddamn shame that I should remember that scene so well: I haven't seen Superman: The Movie since I was 9 years old, but that bit made an impact.

Parker Posey's bit I can barely remember and I just saw the film five freaking hours ago.

But don't waste time talking about Luthor's plan anyway because it's friggin' stupid and there is no way, Kryptonian crystals or not, he could ever hope to pull it off. Look, if you go through the trouble of raising a continent in the middle of the ocean with the aim of using the alien technology you can develop with the Kryptonian crystals you better bring enough food to last you until you get the whole place up and running. Luthor manages to bring three henchmen and Kitty, one helicopter, and uh… that's it. The chopper doesn't even have enough gas to get them back to Metropolis safely.

Nice planning, evil genius.

By the time Superman gets his beat down at the hands and feet of Luthor and his goons I couldn't give two shits about ANY of the main characters or their assorted cohorts.

Except for Lois' kid.

Singer throws a smoking gun to us about two hours in, fires it once, and then teases us for the rest of the movie with the warm pistol. Maybe he was setting up for a sequel or something, but if you are going to put approximately 5000 reaction shots of a five-year-old kid who has already done something VERY much like his father, and you have situations where he could effectively save the day, HAVE THE FUCKING KID SAVE THE DAY! The idea that Lois Lane , about to be drowned with her son, would not ask her son to save them both for fear of hurting Richard's feelings strains credulity to the breaking point.

Not one character has a decent line in the film. Even Superman's trademark quips following the saving of the day fall flat. The acting by Brandon Routh, a newcomer, is excellent considering the leaden, stupid, dialogue he has to spew. And Frank Langella as Perry White is, as always, excellent, though he pales in comparison to a certain other cigar-chewing editor with a flair for headlines in a much better franchise.

Ahem…

Also, and this is totally unrelated to the plot of this film but speaks more to current trends in Superhero film making, why is it that no other mention of the DC universe exists in this film? Raimi's Spiderman films really set the tone by gradually introducing other important characters in each film, Singer did the same in the progression of X-Men films, hell, even Batman Begins (which I disliked as well) managed to work in The Joker at the end to remind us of the vastness of the comic universe. And these little things are like gifts to the fans of the comic title and of the genre.

Superman exists in a vacuum, as if he is the sole superhero in the DC family. I'd have LOVE to see a headline about Billionaire Bruce Wayne on one of the Daily Planet broadsheets, yeah, yeah, different city I know, but this isn't 1978 anymore and shit that happens in New York is not unknown in Chicago, or LA, or Dallas. Since Wayne was a media playboy in Batman Begins, he should have at least merited a mention in Metropolis. Hell, Alan Burnett and Paul Dini did it in "World's Finest" the best DC Universe movie available.

But I'm getting carried away.

In fact, why the hell didn't Singer get Burnett and Dini to write this film in the first place? They have certainly demonstrated their grasp of the Superman character through the fantastic Superman the Animated Series! Or why not Albert Gough and Miles Millar who do such a good job with Smallville? Sure, there are some soap-opera-moments in that show, but the Super stuff is truly super.

Singer's Superman Returns will probably please those who still get hard-in-their-underoos over DVD special releases of Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie (And you know what, I didn't like that film either.) but for the rest of us it's 153 minutes of nice visuals and a flaccid and unremarkable script.

But the real victim here is Lex Luthor. Mario Puzo already defamed the most villainous of villains by making him goofy in 1978, and it's taken decades for Burnett and Dini, as well as Millar and Gough, to bring him to his full on evil whether as a billionaire industrialist madman (voiced by Clancey Brown) or as the man destined to be Superman's nemesis by an insane billionaire industrialist dad (as played by Michael Rosenbaum). Singer's Luthor is modeled on the goofy Puzo characterization. I wondered whether he could even manage to order a pizza without assistance, let alone put the world in jeopardy. A sense of humor in a villain is essential, but to make him a bumbling idiot just strips the film of ANY sense of urgency.

The film looks fine by modern Superhero film standards, i.e. CGI action sequences, no visible wires, etc, and that's all well and good. Metropolis looks like New York , because it was modeled on New York but you never get the same sense of scale as in the Donner film, or in more recent hero tales set in the city such as Spiderman, because Singer keeps the action centered in and around The Daily Planet.

The score incorporates John William's well-known Superman the Movie music with completely forgettable filler by John Ottman.

Bah… wait for this one on network TV. At least the commercials will be interesting.