USA, PG-13, 154 m, 2005
Directed by Bryan Singer. Stars Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey, et al. 

When Richard Donner’s Superman bound into theatres circa 1978, it firmly established then-newcomer Christopher Reeve as the end-all incarnation of the Man of Steel; preceding takes on the superhero were all but forgotten. Mind, I loved George Reeves in the “Adventures of Superman” television show when I was a kid, but in hindsight the suicidal thesp was a trace too gray (and flabby about the mid-section) to don the cape of Krypton’s sole survivor. (Still, he did manage to look a lot like the original Joe Shuster drawings of Clark Kent.) Julliard alumnus Reeve, however, had a great head of hair, a god-like visage (complete with cleft chin), and a perfectly toned body. (Reeve’s physique was actually a bit stringy when he landed the role of Supes, so a padded suit was prepared, but after committing himself to a period of intense physical training with David Prowse, the only muscles Reeve ever flexed in the series were his own.) He also brought a touching earnestness to the part of Superman, and never undermined the character’s integrity with the sort of winking choices lesser players would’ve made. Indeed, most actors couldn’t deliver a line like “I’m here to fight for truth, justice and the American way” without sending the house into titters, but when Reeve spoke those words, you wanted to burst into a round of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Reeve not only had us cheering when Superman raced for the heavens in pursuit of arch-nemesis Lex Luthor’s California-bound missiles, but he also had us rolling in the aisles when the bumbling, bespectacled Clark Kent got stuck in a revolving door. Inspired by the screwball stylings of Carey Grant, Reeve’s Kent at times seemed to totter near the burlesque, but it made perfect sense for Superman to play up his alter-ego’s cloddishness lest anyone ever connect the two identities. The genius of Reeve was that he could call attention to the dissimilarities between an ungainly schlemiel and a dreamy superhero, and yet not lose sight of the underlying humanity that linked both personas. The suits at Warner Bros. were wise to take director Donner’s advice to go with an unknown for the role (others originally considered were James Caan, Paul Newman and Robert Redford); we didn’t bring any preconceived notions into the screening (like we later would with Michael Keaton as Batman). Reeve was so effective as Superman that he almost single-handedly made good on the studio’s famous tag-line, “You will believe a man can fly.” Even in the ill-conceived Superman III or the atrocious Super IV: The Quest for Peace, Reeve carried us along. (The supporting players may have looked like jerks, but Reeve always came out smelling like a rose.) The inheritor of the Superman movie franchise, Brandon Routh, is no Reeve; he’s not practiced at comedy (though he’s not given much funny business to work with), and he doesn’t exude the assurance of a superhero. He looks more like Superboy, even though he’s a year older than Reeve was when he took on the role. But, hey, somebody with the timelessness of Reeve only comes along once in a lifetime, and asking anybody to fill his shiny red boots is a tall order.   

It’s been nineteen years since Superman soared across the silver screen—no, strike that. It’s been more like twenty-six. I shouldn’t count the following two sequels for 1983’s Superman III saw him only fluttering, while the abysmal Superman IV in ’87 found him barely able to get it up. (Reeve agreed to do that last film on the condition that the producing studio, Cannon, would finance his pet project, Street Smart, an abrasive inner-city drama that went on to win all sorts of acclaim for former “Easy Reader” Morgan Freeman.) And while I can’t in good conscience announce that Superman Returns was worth the wait, I can say that it’s a dam site better than Superman III and Superman IV. (That’s not saying much, I know, but hang in there.) The story behind the delays that sentenced a fifth Superman picture to Development Hell reads like a comedy of errors that even the sharpest of Hollywoodland writers couldn’t come up with on a good (read: clean and sober) day.  

Despite the piss-poor critical and commercial response to Superman IV, a continuation was taken into account by its producers, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. In fact, the Israeli moguls (who bought the movie rights from the father and son team of Alexander and Ilya Salkind, producers of the first three Superman pictures, as well as Supergirl) had thought to draw on the unused footage from Superman IV (there was almost 50 minutes worth—most of it ripped from a disastrous sneak preview in Southern California) to help fashion another title, but their cut-rate studio, Cannon, went belly-up before it could be finished. The rights to Superman slipped back to the Salkinds, who proposed a new movie that picked up sometime after Superman II, and they commissioned occasional “Superboy” writers Mark Jones and Cary Bates (who also wrote for the Superman comic books) to forge the script. Its working title was Superman: The New Movie, and the storyline’s main event had Superman throwing down with Brainiac, a Coluan mastermind who came to Earth to shrink the city of Metropolis. (The movie was to end with something of a cliffhanger as Lois revealed she was heavy with Superman’s child.) The Salkinds tried to tempt Christopher Reeve back into the blue tights, but he sent his regrets out of fear that he was becoming typecast. (I’d say it was already a bit too late to start fretting over that.) They then turned to Gerard Christopher, who did a respectable job as the title character in the Salkinds’ syndicated TV series, “Superboy,” but nothing came of it as the Salkinds lost their option on the material before production could commence. In 1992, the rights were given back to DC Comics, which is a division of Warner Bros., the folks in charge of distributing the first three Superman films and co-distributing Superman IV. Warner Bros. then contracted Jon Peters (who produced both Batman and Batman Returns) to help revive the Superman movie franchise, leading to a decade-long back-and-forth with numberless talent long on far-out ideas but short on insight into the iconic figure. 

In 1994, Peters turned to “21 Jump Street” writer Jonathan Lemkin, who came up with something entitled Superman Reborn, the action of which tied loosely into “The Death of Superman” story arc from the comic books. But there was an odd (perhaps pot-induced) twist: After being offed by the ogre Doomsday, Superman’s soul somehow finds its way into Lois Lane’s body, and she soon gives birth to a baby that within weeks grows into an adult Superman that comes back to kicks Doomsday’s ass and save the world. The script’s deliberate campiness and contentious subtext (which Lemkin admits he added to “piss off the far right”) didn’t sit well with the Warner Bros. executives, and it was wisely disposed of. Peters (the dollar signs forever blinking in his cold, cold eyes) then turned to Gregory Poirier (Rosewood), whose script also borrowed from “The Death of Superman,” and had Clark Kent frequenting a psychiatrist for his super-sized identity crisis. In addition to Brainiac and Doomsday, Poirier’s treatment featured a host of other super-villains vying for Superman’s destruction, such as the energy-sucking Parasite and that Netherworld twat with the lethal pipes, Silver Banshee. (The convoluted treatment did contain at least one promising scene: At Superman’s funeral, Batman places a glove on his dead friend’s casket.) This was all met with a lack of interest by the decision-makers at Warner Bros., so Kevin Smith (writer and director of such useless items as Clerks and Chasing Amy) was brought on board to take a whack at some script ideas, but with the caveat that he abide by Peters’ weird suggestions: Superman should spar with an oversized spider, Superman should not wear his signature jumpsuit and cape, Brainiac should have an effeminate robot sidekick and a furry pet resembling Chewbacca, and so on. Eventually a script (still retaining archenemy Brainiac, but eighty-sixing Superman’s angst) was delivered in 1997. Entitled Superman Lives, the project was green-lit by the WB execs, and they aimed for a July ’98 release. The directorial duties were assigned to Tim Burton, who had many kooky ideas of his own, and hired Batman Returns scribe Wesley Strick to help flesh them out. In Strick’s screenplay, Brainiac and Lex Luthor somehow physically amalgamate into an über-baddie called "Luthiac," and Superman, bereft of his usual powers, must utilize Kryptonian technologies to keep it from taking over the world. Believe it or not, one draft had Superman outfitted in a self-healing extoskeleton barely resembling his usual garb, as well as traveling from place to place not in a single bound, but rather in some sort of super-flying machine. Of course, now that this was a Burton project, Superman’s sense of alienation would be strongly emphasized, making him more spiritually akin to Batman and Edward Scissorhands than Jesus of Nazareth.  

Nicolas Cage was hired to play Superman for the Burton project, but being a long-time Superman fan, he pushed to wear the hero’s traditional costume. After the moneymen got a load of Cage’s screen test, they suspended production, allowing Cage and Burton to walk away with full paychecks thanks to their “pay or play” contracts. Another script by Dan Gilroy (Two for the Money), which was modeled after Strick’s version, was shopped around, but didn’t get any bites. The seemingly endless string of holdups in the production of a fifth Superman flick became so frustrating for one comic book lover, Alex Ford, that he decided (with a little prodding from the missus) to pen a spanking new adventure himself. Ford’s submission won him a meeting with the soulless creatures at Warner Bros, where he pitched his idea for a chain of Superman pictures that would add untold millions to the studio’s coffers. Ford’s rather ambitious cinematic strategy called for a seven-part series in which each chapter would serve up a different bad guy: Metallo (an android with a kryptonite power source), Bizarro (a goofy doppelganger to Superman with reverse powers like x-ray hearing), Brainiac, Silver Banshee, Mr. Mxyzptlk (our favorite omnipotent imp and practical joker from the fifth dimension), Doomsday (at whose monstrous claws Supes would meet his Waterloo), and finally Darkseid (the God of Evil, who would take on the resurrected hero). Peters liked the idea, but the studio brass elected to take the film in a different direction. One particularly silly concept was Batman vs. Superman, in which both of the studio’s comic book franchises would be resurrected in one fell swoop. Director Wolfgang Petersen became involved, but like everything else in the story of Superman V, the plan fell apart.  

In 2001, Peters took the project to Charlie’s Angels director McG and “Lost” creator J.J. Abrams, who were both interested in developing a trilogy of films that took even more liberties with the Superman legend than the Smith or Strick screenplays. McG detached himself from the project for one reason or another (probably to direct Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle), and the script was forwarded to Brett Ratner (Red Dragon), who eventually passed on it due to creative differences. By 2004, the project found its way to X-Men wunderkind Bryan Singer, whose more traditional take on the material (as well as loosely tying it back into the earlier Superman movies) seemed to make the most (fiscal) sense to Peters. X-Men screenwriters Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty helped Singer bang out a screenplay that returned Superman to his roots, proving once again that those Jim Beam ads had this topsy-turvy world all figured out: “You always come back to the basics.”  

Superman Returns is a sequel; it uses Superman and Superman II as its back-story, and acts as if the other two movies never existed. (Could anyone in their right mind object to the filmmakers disregarding storylines that revolved around such limp villains as Gus Gorman and—God help us—Nuclear Man?) But Superman Returns plays more like an homage than an extension. We can spot from the main titles that Singer wants to reconnect to Donner’s film, but in doing so he fails to bring anything fresh to the Superman legend. The opening credit sequence in Superman remains one of my favorites, what with the bold 3-D typeface emerging from the blackness of space and whizzing this way and that way off the screen. The accompanying overture by John Williams was nothing short of awe-inspiring; it assured us that the following reels were not going to offer up just another juvenile comic book movie, but rather an adventure of epic proportions. That intro was puzzlingly altered for the subsequent features: In Superman II, the credits were wed to snippets of action from Superman, and in Superman III, they were consigned to the bottom of the frame so director Richard Lester could fill the rest of it with a clever but out of place slapstick routine. Singer, however, returns to Donner’s way of doing things: The camera barrels through the cosmos as the titles fly hither and thither with a great “WHOOSH!” The movie has been scored by John Ottman, but John Williams’ Superman theme is still front and center. I half-expected the hairs on the back of my neck to get all prickly from these nostalgic flourishes, but I was left feeling surprisingly unmoved. Maybe because the whole production looked too glossy, too contrived, too goddamned by-the-numbers. I was excited at first to hear that Singer would be emulating the tone of Superman, but it winds up working against him. The more he tries to make Superman Returns like Superman, the more he makes everyone miss it.  

The movie proper takes place five or so years after the events in Superman II, which should place the action somewhere around 1988 instead of the present day, but no matter. Since he took down General Zod and his posse of Kryptonian naughty-heads, Superman has been absent from Metropolis, futilely combing outer space for remains of his home planet. When he returns, he finds that his adopted world has moved on without him. His old flame, fellow reporter Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), has finally nabbed the Pulitzer Prize for her article “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” She also has a new shack-up beau, Richard (James Marsden), as well as a five-year-old asthmatic son, Jason (Tristan Lake Leabu). Of course, it won’t be long before the son of Jor-El has to help Miss Lane out of some dodgy situation, and their romantic feelings for one another are rekindled. But someone (maybe Mr. Mxyzptlk, that little prick) has drained the life out of these characters, and the actors portraying them aren’t compelling enough to pull up the slack. Alas, Routh and Bosworth make for a bland coupling; their romantic interludes don’t rouse us in the least, and we pine for the unconventional chemistry of Reeve and Kidder. In Superman, Lois’s first date with the Man of Steel was capped with a flight over Metropolis, complete with a spin around the Statue of Liberty. At one point, Lois lost her hold on Superman’s hand, and she tumbled through the clouds, her hysterical cries drawing a mere shake of the head from her colorfully clad suitor. After all, this was Superman; he knew no harm would come to Lois as long as he was nearby. And when he finally did catch her, they fell into a tender embrace, lightly turning through the night air, gazing into each other’s eyes as Williams’ love theme twinkled on the soundtrack. My goodness, was that not one of the dreamiest moments in the history of the movies? (It has since become even more heart-rending given the tragedies that befell its players.) The sequence is partly replicated in Superman Returns, but it feels perfunctory; you can tell that Singer doesn’t buy this fairy tale stuff any more than Lester did. Donner, though, ate it up, and he didn’t give two shits if it wound up alienating the fanboys. Naturally, that part of Superman’s audience hated Miss Kidder’s spoken-word poem “Can You Read My Mind,” but I was always moved by its unashamedly goofy romanticism. Superman Returns never achieves that kind of starry-eyed delirium. It’s too mechanical.  

When Superman isn’t courting Lois, he’s putting away bad guys, but the baddest of the bad guys, the chrome-domed Lex Luthor, never stays put away for long. He’s sprung from the hoosegow this time on a legal loophole, and you better believe he’s got a brand new bag of evil tricks to dig into. Gene Hackman had a high ol’ time hamming it up as Luthor in Superman; he provided much of the film’s comic relief. But this Lex Luthor, as played by Kevin Spacey, is a lot viler. When Superman Returns first hooks up with him, he’s keeping vigil at the bedside of a terminally ill, blue-haired billionairess, played by Noel Neill. (Trivia buffs know she played Lois Lane in the 1948 Superman chapter plays and on TV’s “Adventures of Superman.”) As grasping relatives desperately pound on her locked chamber door, she gathers the strength to sign over her fortune to her much younger companion. “I love you, Lex Luthor,” she wheezes, and then buys the farm. (God knows how long it took Luthor to carry out this Anna Nicole-style con; only a true sociopathic sumbitch could come up with the patience to see it through.) Victorious, he throws off his hairpiece, and collects his moll, Kitty (Parker Posey), who’s been posing as a maid all the while. It’s that time again to take over the world.  

Luthor and Kitty (accompanied by a pack of brawny goons) make their way north, where Luthor nabs some crystals from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Luthor’s plan is to use the Kryptonian icicles to form a new continent, submerging the US in the process. Still teed off at Superman for thwarting his plan to knock California into the ocean (which would’ve made priceless beachfront property out of all the worthless desert land he bought up in Arizona and Nevada), Lex Baby has another scheme in mind to take down the Blue Boy once and for all. When he finally does get the better of Superman, he seems to take sexual delight in watching his adversary suffer. Hackman’s Luthor was certainly a bad man, but he was also affable, funny—you loved to hate him. Spacey’s Luthor is a black-hearted sickie, and the whole mind vs. muscle routine between him and Superman takes on a homoerotic quality here that just might make you feel a little green about the gills. And while I prefer my Lex Luthor less venomous, Spacey gives the proceedings a much-needed charge every time he slithers into frame.  

The rest of the cast doesn’t fare as well. Kate Bosworth is miscast as Lois Lane; she’s much too young for the part, and she lacks Kidder’s klutzy, scatter-brained charm. (You can imagine Bosworth playing Miss Lane in, say, a high school production of It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman.) In Donner’s classic, Lois Lane’s messiness stood in sharp contrast to Superman’s watertight demeanor, and that made them an exciting couple. It’s hard to say what exactly Superman finds so endearing in this Lois Lane. (Certainly not that unfortunate wig!) One reviewer commented that Bosworth is “prettier” than Kidder, which is a rather depthless observation, but not surprising when you consider that the chucklehead who said it is a protégé of none other than Roger “Bully is a masterpiece” Ebert.  

Superman Returns is a much more serious film than Superman; it doesn’t take advantage of the comic possibilities inherent in the far-fetched material. When Clark Kent resumes his nine-to-five at The Daily Planet, it’s hardly the hectic newsroom bustling with colorful types that we remember from the good ol’ days of Donner. (Or even Lester.) As editor-in-chief Perry White, Frank Langella is oddly subdued—he reminded me more of Lt. Martin Castillo from TV’s “Miami Vice” than the inflexible, cigar-chompin’ ink-stained wretch from the Superman comic books. As far as I’m concerned, Jackie Cooper nailed the character in Superman, although I always regretted that he didn’t get to a chance to bark White’s catch phrase, “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” The line finally makes it into Singer’s update, but Langella only mumbles it. (I doubt Singer intended for Langella to underplay Perry White; it was probably Langella’s idea, seeing how he likes to play against expectations—even if it’s not appropriate for the character.) White’s adolescent shutterbug, Jimmy Olsen, is on hand, but sans his usual gee-whiz bravado. Truth be told, Jimmy isn’t given much more to do here than he did in the previous installments, but he’s made even more marginal by the fact that Sam Huntington is no Marc McClure. Or even Jack Larson, who makes a cameo appearance as Bo the Barkeeper.  

The only returning cast member from the preceding Superman movies is the late Marlon Brando as Jor-El, Superman’s papa and apparent genetic contributor to his son’s signature curl. Singer uses archival footage of the legendary actor that was originally intended for Superman II, but was ordered cut by the Salkinds when Brando demanded a percentage of the sequel’s profits. The shots of Brando interacting with Kal-El (as well as Luthor) by way of the ice fortress’s holographic viewer were then assigned to Susannah York, who played Superman’s mother, Lara. The leftover Brando stuff has been digitally modified for inclusion in Superman Returns, and it fits seamlessly into the action. This posthumous performance (much of which was actually culled from Superman) is some sort of first for the movies, but seeing how Brando’s cremated carcass has been scattered to the winds, he can’t insist on top billing or a chunk of the movie’s box office.  

And Superman Returns just might do enough box office to recoup its astronomical price tag. (Some estimates put it at $270 million.) In this post-9/11 age, we need Superman more than ever, so it’s frustrating that the movie never really takes off. Though optical effects involving wires and models might appear hokey to today’s younger viewers, I still find such old-school in-camera trickery preferable to the abundance of CGI work in contemporary fantasy films. Though primitively done, the flying sequences in the first two Superman films were exhilarating; Superman Returns eschews the harnesses in favor of CGI, and while the movie is occasionally diverting, it never fully grabs you. Whether Superman is helping to land an injured aircraft or zipping into Earth’s upper atmosphere, it never strikes you that what he’s doing up there on the screen is all that super. Maybe because we know that it was all rendered in a computer, and I don’t care how more ‘photorealistic” Superman Returns is than the quainter special-effect machines of yesteryear, I’ll stick with Superman lifting papier-mâché boulders, thank you very much. 

July 4, 2006

Ó Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.