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Film review

19 years later, nothing new

The new Man of Steel looks the part, but Superman’s return underwhelms.

By STEVE PERSALL
Published June 27, 2006

Nineteen years is a long time to wait for a version of Superman that isn’t much different than what we’ve seen before. Superman Returns casts the Man of Steel in a movie that steals from the 1978 original starring Christopher Reeve, with few new ideas that work and several that don’t.

Reeve’s replacement, 26-year-old Brandon Routh, closely resembles his predecessor yet doesn’t have the same uncanny ability to adjust his posture and speech pattern and clearly draw a line between the superhero and his alter ego, mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent.

Routh’s transformation is all about the hair, moving from Clark’s slicked-down chic to a heroic forehead curl when the going gets tough.

Routh isn’t bad but he isn’t Reeve, who didn’t allow the comic book trappings to hide his instincts as a serious actor. Routh is equally handsome, fills out the suit well and apparently doesn’t get nauseated from hanging on flight wires to be digitally erased later.

He is a competent replacement whose best attribute is appealing to young ticket buyers.

Routh won’t have as much trouble as Reeve in being associated with this role, enabling his casting chances in more down-to-earth projects.

Superman Returns covers the hero’s charisma shortage with several top-notch action sequences: The rescue of a jet airliner with a space shuttle strapped to its top is certainly more thrilling than anything the 1978 film could accomplish in the predigital era.

Heavy artillery shells bounce off the hero’s chest like tracer bullets and a few blocks of Metropolis awesomely crumble. Director Bryan Singer (the first two X-Men flicks) certainly knows how to transform comic book action panels to vibrant film.

However, the material between the mayhem is troublesome. Singer often displays a bit too much reverence for earlier versions, slowing the first act pace with rehashes of Superman’s home planet Krypton exploding, the crash of a spaceship carrying baby Kal-El on the Kent family farm and teenage experimentation with super powers.

Singer even revives the voice and spectral image of Marlon Brando as Superman’s father going over the same godly advice. A movie running 154 minutes doesn’t need that kind of overly familiar padding.

And after Batman Begins so radically changed the tone of its predecessors, the sameness of Superman Returns is disappointing.

Even new ideas are pockmarked with bad logic. Superman disappeared from Earth for five years because astronomers may have located fragments of his home planet of Krypton and he felt kind of nostalgic. This is the superguy who flew so rapidly in 1978 that he could reverse the world’s orbit to spin back the clock.

He can’t fly to a scientifically designated area of the universe and come back sooner? Heck, Kal-El’s spaceship took him from Krypton to Earth before the kid stopped sucking his thumb.

Reliable archvillain Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) also returns, again working on a real estate scheme at mankind’s expense. Now he plans to use stolen crystals from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude to grow a new continent in the Atlantic Ocean, then charge billions for waterfront property.

But the land mass that grows — like sea monkeys, someone suggests — is nothing but jagged, askew monoliths of stone. Who would live there?

Spacey also deserves partial blame for the film’s listlessness. He takes a few extra seconds to deliver many of his lines, perhaps thinking the pauses sound especially evil. It actually makes Lex sound like a slow thinker. We miss the campy energy Gene Hackman brought to the role three decades ago.

The filmmakers had the right idea in Lex’s introductory scene, showing how despicably low he stoops to amass a fortune. After that, Spacey plays villainy too detached to merit a hiss.

At least he has one good scene. His Beyond the Sea co-star Kate Bosworth can’t manage even  that as Lois Lane, Superman’s love interest (and Clark’s Daily Planet colleague). Bosworth looks too green to be an intrepid, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. She is more of a damsel than a dame, and a dame is what such distress needs.

That’s part of the tender side Singer introduces, making Lois a single mother in a crush rectangle with Superman/Clark and her fiance, played by James Marsden. (Comic book geeks will dig the notion that Cyclops from X-Men is her live-in.)

Superman Returns offers fine action and a few striking images of the hero overseeing our safety from outer space, including a messianic pose complete with chanting choir, in case things aren’t majestic enough already. I don’t like what Singer devised for Superman’s flying technique. Rather than zooming, he mostly rises like a helium balloon.

The 1978 film’s advertisements promised: “You will believe a man can fly.” Groundbreaking special effects for that time made it happen.

“You will believe a man can float” simply doesn’t have the same ring to it. Neither does the movie.

Steve Persall can be reached at (727) 893-8365 or persall@sptimes.com.
 

Superman Returns

Grade: B-

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Brandon Routh, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Parker Posey, Frank Langella, Eva Marie Saint, James Marsden

Screenplay: Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, based on DC Comics characters

Rating: PG-13; action violence

Running time: 154 min.

[Last modified June 27, 2006, 07:54:40]