Can You Read My Review?
Truth and Justice fall to Joyless Bombast in Superman Returns.
BY GREGORY
Stalker. Deadbeat dad. Slacker son. Meddler. Show-off. Wannabe-Messiah. Two-faced deceiver. Relentless attention-
hog. And -- most notably -- the exclusive source of a cataclysm threatening to ruin the face of the planet and kill billions
of people. This is today’s Superman. Do we like him? I, for one, do not.
Look, I’m a hopeful fantasist. I want to believe. For the first few minutes of Superman Returns, there is hope. Things
start off promisingly with a stern title card telling us that a wise scientist on the doomed planet Krypton flung his baby
Earthward, then we get the requisite Marlon Brando voice-over doing the requisite father-son power-riff (which will be
repeated ad nauseam with cinder-block subtlety until nearly the film’s final frames). The flashy opening titles mimic those
of Richard Donner’s and Richard Lester’s Superman films, and then we get a nicely creepy intro to the villain, doing an
Anna Nicole Smith gender-reversal estate-grab on an ancient rich woman (complete with pen stuck in her cold, dead
claw; a hearty dark chuckle). Hey, it’s the bewigged Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey doing a bald retread on his Swimming
With Sharks character), and is that Parker Posey and a couple of Pomeranians? Which is which? Things are looking up!
Oops. Maybe not. While it’s nice to see the lovely Eva Marie Saint out on the rustic Kent farm in the middle of the
Australian outback (“Kansas” -- whatever) -- and the shot with the crazy meteorite-ship crashing down, reflected in the
window beside her face, really is quite pretty -- suddenly the movie goes irrevocably awry.
It is at this point that we suffer the merciless onslaught of The Choir. You know: That haunted bellowing which worked
okay in 2001 and the original Omen and even in the fight with Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. That Choir. The
Choir That Says Too Much. Ma Kent drives her seventy-year-old farm truck to investigate the weird, crystalline
spacecraft in the middle of all that non-indigenous Aussie corn (Spoiler: The Kents were always closet Aborigines!), and
although alien interloper Kal-El -- also known as Clark Kent, also known as Superman -- reaches creepily from the
shadows, it is The Choir that really becomes the main character for the rest of the movie. Sorry, otherwise entertaining
composer John Ottman, but The Choir sucks. Superman -- like all Super Heroes -- is inherently silly. He looks ridiculous,
he does ridiculous things. I don’t want him sickeningly fetishised from forelock to bulging crotch to the tips of his boots,
attended by this crazy, aggressively worshipful bellowing. Upon this writing, I have seen this movie twice, and have
given it considerable thought, and there’s no way of getting around it: The tone of Superman Returns is wrong, wrong,
wrong.
This is not to say that director Bryan Singer hasn’t produced an impressive surface facsimile of Richard Donner’s
Superman: The Movie (No -- not Superman: The Toaster-Oven?) and (mostly) Richard Lester’s still-wonderful
Superman II. He has. The spectacle and strange self-seriousness are here, and although I do not join the automatons pre-
programmed to hiss and spit at the very notion of Superman III: The Richard Pryor Debacle and Superman IV: The
Quest for Licensing, I can say that this sequel generally has its act together more than those did (though it really, truly is
not as much fun as Supergirl). Singer -- who made a name for himself in this genre with the impressive X-Men and X-2:
X-Men United (both of which I liked, even though I slightly preferred Brett Ratner’s third, punchiest, least maudlin
instalment) -- attacks this material with luminous dedication, simultaneously mimicking the echoes of yore (particularly
Donner’s) and -- er -- spewing over it what appears to be a strange sort of lonely middle-age crisis, with the constantly
lionized Superman as his own ego’s arrogant-yet-lost stand-in. The result is sometimes visually impressive but otherwise
quite iffy -- both times I saw this 2 1/2-hour thing, the packed houses laughed and cheered only about three times each
(with the biggest cheer of all coming at the closing dedication to the amazing Christopher Reeve and his wife Dana) --
and although it pains me to say this, honesty must prevail: Superman Returns is, alas, a pumped-up forgery, a bloated,
hyper-reverent and sensationally un-fun exercise in technique.
A few nights ago, it was my pleasure to behold on the big screen for the first time in a quarter-century another epic sci-fi
movie of my youth, The Road Warrior, which was attended by its star-villain, Vernon Wells. Referring to the third Mad
Max movie, which boasted a fat budget compared to the beans on which the undeniably impressive The Road Warrior
was made, Wells said, “When you’ve got too much money, all the heart goes out of it.” Bingo: Superman Returns.
Why don’t producers understand this? Are they retarded?
Also, why are we still being assaulted by aging geeks’ very expensive love-letters to their adolescent selves, like
Spielberg’s crappy War of the Worlds, Emmerich’s crappy Godzilla, and the Wachowski brothers’ crazy-ass Matrix
sequels? Superman Returns is somewhat superior to these and other pricey errors, but in its outrageous aggrandisement
of pulp the same appraisal applies.
Why are there so many irksome little elements here, too? -- from the insulting brevity of John Williams’ credit in the title
sequence (during his own appropriated theme!), to the crazy, cross-eyed nun displayed prominently on the news monitor
(Those Catholics! They’re bad!) juxtaposed with aggressively Euro-friendly Superman propaganda, to the bewilderingly
prominent Mountain Dew ad atop the taxi-cab Clark summons for Lois (all you need to know about this Superman you
may learn at the Slurpee machine at your local 7-11). During the epic CG work at the end, I kept thinking, “Lord of the
Rings-envy; Lord of the Rings-envy...” -- and it looks like this won’t be the last time (Hello, Paramount, 2007!).
Even the “...Returns From What?” quandary bugs: We have already established that Superman can fly so fast he can
make time go backward, plus his original spaceship from Krypton got his baby-self delivered to Earth faster than FedEx.
So why was he gone for five whole years? Why the lame excuses? Makes no sense at all.
Even in the press, this juggernaut is confusing, with Singer’s original quote that one could take the cross (that Christian
thing) and Superman’s ‘S’ shield into the jungle (Exsqueeze me? The jungle?) and “you’ll have fifty-fifty recognition.”
The principle is clear, but with “the cross” carefully removed from the quote, all we’ve got is gutless P.R. If you’re
gonna say something with your big piece of art, say it!
Then there is the matter of the cast. Sigh. With Frank Langella merely mugging as the know-it-all prat editor of the Daily
Australian, and Saint reduced to a cameo, Spacey is the only real actor on board -- and that’s just barely. (I can’t stand
Gene Hackman, but at least he made Lex Luthor fun, rather than merely faggy and petulant.) Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane
is a totally lousy presence and she even has a boring butt. As her kinda-sorta common-law cuckold-husband (and
onscreen nephew to Langella, revealing how nepotism rules the media even within movies), James Marsden gets to play
(whee) a jealous fool to Superman, and really shouldn’t have bailed on the X-Men franchise. And then there’s Sam
Huntington as this movie’s Jimmy Olsen, who is supposed to be all about guileless charm but instead comes across as a
smarmy creep pretending to be a bow-tie sweetie. Bleh.
Rather than claiming and illuminating these roles as did the far superior casts of the previous movies (including Pryor),
these people woodenly play-act their way through Superman Returns, and the result is not Smallville but Dullsville.
Perhaps, having become accustomed to Singer working with the gifted likes of Ian McKellen and the highly excitable
Hugh Jackman, I expect too much, but not a single member of this cast presents an improvement or even an intriguing
variation upon the work of the previous generation (Margot Kidder, Marc McClure, your respective presences are much
missed here). None deserve this criticism more specifically than Brandon Routh, who is barely even capable of giving us
The Man of Steel as what Singer very clearly wishes him to be: A fashion plate, a boy-toy. Watching this kid’s naturally-
brown eye color constantly shifting in contact-enhanced hue, watching him do the monkey-see-monkey-do as if on a
very inflated dare, I struggled but could not help feeling robbed of the excellence of Reeve’s performance -- Reeve who
came from Princeton and theatre, Reeve who never took himself too seriously in the role, Reeve who used his own
muscles, Reeve who got it. Routh is occasionally passable, but never rises above mediocrity: As with the rest of the
skewed-too-young cast, he merely seems like he won the Big Break Jackpot and is expending most of his energy
remembering not to blink in close-up.
And the narrative? Feh. Please don’t get me wrong: I love absurdity. I love absurdity so much that it constantly gets me
into trouble because almost nobody in America has a smart sense of humour. (And Gawd forbid the critic who does not
beg to blur into the symbiotic pop-culture consensus -- direction of thumb notwithstanding.) The plot of any Superman
story inherently involves absurdity. That’s dandy. But the plot of Superman Returns is often just plain stupid. That’s not
dandy. To wit (or lack thereof):
Luthor, walking free from prison on facile script-loophole legalese, cheats one of those billionaire dying women in order
to grab her standard-issue old-lady enormous ultra-high-tech yacht with helicopter launch-pad, the better to cruise with
his henchmen around the Great Barrier Reef and along the coast of Queensland to Superman’s crystalline Fortress of
Solitude, where he happens to know exactly how to make the crystals work in order to get an animated Marlon Brando-
head to pop up and tell him how to use crystal shards to create extremely pointy and essentially uninhabitable land-
masses (combined, they’d yield the approximate total area of an average golf course), the better to supersede New South
Wales (“North America” -- whatever), killing the aforementioned billions (who, notably, would be in no peril whatsoever
if Superman simply NEVER CAME TO EARTH IN THE FIRST PLACE), all of which makes his earlier, blow-up-the-
San-Andreas-Fault scheme seem astoundingly plausible by comparison.
(In the midst of this, Lex solemnly mutters a line which begs for a screen-shout: “This is where he learned who he was,”
he intones, “this is where he came for guidance.” What? The Fortress of Solitude is in West Hollywood?)
Meanwhile, Kal-Clark-SupieSales keeps kvetching that he has nowhere to live in downtown Sydney, but somehow
tolerates the very rude and self-absorbed bitch Lois, probably because he impregnated her five years earlier -- which is
strange because you’d figure that she’d be walking around with a big hole in the top of her cranium where her brains
blew out -- and he re-commences his love for her by swooping directly to the upmarket waterfront house she shares
with live-in stooge Marsden and “their” asthmatic-moppet son, Jason (Tristan Lake Leabu), the better to stalk her and
spy on her family with X-Ray Vision and Super-Hearing (which sounds remarkably like Bad Cell-Phone Reception) in the
manner of a common criminal -- this before Lois and her boy zoom directly into uncommon criminal Luthor’s clutches
in Sydney Harbour, leading toward a final confrontation near, um, Adelaide? Brisbane? Perth? Who cares?
Having been promised such glories by a former liar-editor myself, I derived good laughs from the notion of Lois winning
a “Pulitzer” for an article entitled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman” -- she being essentially a dullard child,
shown to be incapable of spelling, who draws a total blank while attempting to write a new article to suggest the
converse. I just wish they’d gone whole-hog in depicting journos as alcoholic idiots.
Scriptwise: Clark’s flashback to his dewy, Aboriginal, corn-hopping youth: Pointless. Luthor’s enormous “Train Set”
room (which magically morphs into a completely different room when it explodes): Silly. The conveniently monumental
“Saving The 777” sequence (lifted largely from the 1940s Fleischer-brothers animated episode, “Japoteurs” -- !! --
wherein Superman shows those evil-Jap military-plane-thieves what’s what!): Overwrought. The eight-minute,
chemistry-free, floating-over-Sydney-with-boring-Lois “romantic” sequence: Lifeless. The “Bank-Gunner”: Ridiculous.
Lois flouncing directly into Luthor’s clutches: Lazy. Lois has a password on her computer but advanced-being Jor-El
couldn’t put a security code on the Fortress of Solitude?: Madness! Superman willfully crushes a useful and attractive
green Volvo wagon which the humble author of this piece would be delighted to have: Unpardonable. And Kryptonite...
Okay, Kal-El’s home planet blew up. So what? Happens out there in the universe. Why would pieces of it harm him any
more than would a chunk of dirt inserted into our pasta harm us?
This whole “Seed of The Other” theme, too -- we’ve seen it many times before, in Rosemary’s Baby, The Dunwitch
Horror, Cronenberg’s The Fly and even Alien and Humanoids From the Deep. How exactly is creepy ol’ not-human
Superman knocking up Lois any different?
There is one lively scene I liked a lot, aboard the boat, involving the freak-kid and the primary henchman, Brutus, played
with amusing verve by David Fabrizio. Under the terrible duress of both: (a) being kidnapped; and (b) being devoid of
talent, Kate Bosworth tells little Jason, logically enough (?), to go play Luthor’s grand piano. As established earlier during
Superman’s stalker-scene, SuperJason is adept at playing “Heart and Soul.” At this point, Fabrizio struts his knack for
going funny-scary, doffing his “I’m Not Lex, I’m The Other Bald Guy” cap, revealing a demented clown-face tattooed
on the back of his head. He sits down and joins Jason at the ivories, skillfully adding the low-end to what becomes a duet
of “Heart and Soul” -- all sans dialogue, and cannily directed to milk tension from the situation whilst also delivering
genuine smiles. It’s good work from all concerned, and I wish that the rest of the movie (which saliently lacks both
Heart and Soul) could have achieved such elegance of performance and economy of direction.
Unfortunately, that scene does disintegrate into quite terrible violence -- and I don’t mean the laugh-out-loud punchline,
but rather the thug’s shockingly abusive treatment of Lois. Here is another complaint I lodge against this alleged
“children’s movie”: Its scenes of violence are much, much too violent. Aboard the crashing plane, passengers are
slammed about fiercely with sickening thuds (until, of course, they all end up magically back in their seats once
Superman saves the day). Brutus’ battery of Lois is brief but genuinely harrowing -- even disgusting. And then --
although I smiled because I enjoyed watching this Superman get his smug little ass kicked -- the abuse heaped upon “our
hero” by Luthor and his thugs on The Isle Of Kryptonite (a.k.a. “New Krypton” -- hello, sequels) goes far beyond the
call of duty for depicting brutality in a “family film.”
Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I should make a few brief but relevant revelations here at the close of this
review. I went to movie school with this movie’s director, and have watched his fortunes soar while I was cruelly shot
down by the slimy “alternative” newspaper company who recently allowed their boy in L.A. to get down on all fours and
fellate Singer in a total puff-piece cover-story which would be utterly verboten if actual fairness and not shallow
favoritism ruled the game. Another minion in the fold also got to do a puff on the big premiere because she blew the right
big-shot. Thus a certain bitterness enhances my perspective in some matters, and I admit that. I tend to speak frankly,
which led to a backstabbing via their little pet weasel in Cleveland (an ugly town, not coincidentally the real birthplace of
Superman). However -- although en route to the screening of Superman Returns on the USC campus I passed the spot
near Webb Tower where Singer (then an unmarketed fellow student) years ago, apropos of nothing, regaled me with one
of the filthiest (and least plausible) personal anecdotes I have ever heard (I could say more, but why?) -- I have also
come to appreciate the media-manipulating guy. From a distance. Over the years, what was pure obnoxiousness (beyond
my own, for I am truly The Mildest of Movie Geeks) has evolved into a professed vulnerability and a genuine Passion
(Messianic pun intended) for his Statements -- even when they're lame like Superman Returns. Go ahead and accuse me
of jealousy, but it’s really more that I’d also like to be paid millions and millions of dollars to masturbate. I didn’t like
Superman Returns (and I did give it a double-viewing, just to be sure), but I’m pleased that Bryan got bold and has
achieved some of his dreams of fame and fortune with his better movies (i.e.: the ones with Ian McKellen in them), and I
wish him well with the next ones, even though the tagline for this one should have been: “You’ll Believe B.S. Can Fly.”
Whoops, there’s more: Suddenly I am reminded of a rare instance of seeming to have a life, which I experienced a
couple of months ago as I strode the Sunset Strip with two smart, creative and gorgeous women on holiday from
overseas to explore Movie Town. As we approached The Viper Room to see where River Phoenix died (why is it that the
good ones are always stolen from us?), we glanced up at a billboard looming over Tower Records, bearing the huge ‘S’
of Superman. “I have absolutely no interest in seeing that,” commented one of the women. “Yeah, who gives a shit?”
replied the other. I merely shrugged and said I’d give it a go. More recently, one of them emailed me and asked of
Superman Returns, “How bad was it?” Well, friend, your answer lies above.
Intrigued readers, if you’d like to enjoy an utterly unpretentious and wickedly entertaining treatise upon this same basic
theme, I very strongly recommend Philippe Mora’s whimsical and wonderful The Return of Captain Invincible. It’s a
sweetly outrageous romp featuring superior actor Alan Arkin as the eponymous lead, a confused Super Hero (who sings!
songs by Rocky Horror’s Richard O’Brien!), who finds himself lost, post-HUAC, in an alcoholic haze in Australia (!),
and must sober up and regain his powers in order to battle the fascistic Mr. Midnight (a typically delightful and amusingly
groovy Christopher Lee, singing with great gusto!) to save not only the world, but the funky soul of the people in it.
Note: The Return of Captain Invincible is available on DVD and I now employ my Super Critic Powers to suggest that
you rush right out to get it this very instant. Oh, and don’t watch it alone; have a party.
Superman Returns
Entertainment Value: 4/13
Style: 6/13
Philosophical Insight: 2/13
-Gregory Weinkauf, 25 June, 2006
Truth and Justice fall to Joyless Bombast in Superman Returns.
BY GREGORY
Stalker. Deadbeat dad. Slacker son. Meddler. Show-off. Wannabe-Messiah. Two-faced deceiver. Relentless attention-
hog. And -- most notably -- the exclusive source of a cataclysm threatening to ruin the face of the planet and kill billions
of people. This is today’s Superman. Do we like him? I, for one, do not.
Look, I’m a hopeful fantasist. I want to believe. For the first few minutes of Superman Returns, there is hope. Things
start off promisingly with a stern title card telling us that a wise scientist on the doomed planet Krypton flung his baby
Earthward, then we get the requisite Marlon Brando voice-over doing the requisite father-son power-riff (which will be
repeated ad nauseam with cinder-block subtlety until nearly the film’s final frames). The flashy opening titles mimic those
of Richard Donner’s and Richard Lester’s Superman films, and then we get a nicely creepy intro to the villain, doing an
Anna Nicole Smith gender-reversal estate-grab on an ancient rich woman (complete with pen stuck in her cold, dead
claw; a hearty dark chuckle). Hey, it’s the bewigged Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey doing a bald retread on his Swimming
With Sharks character), and is that Parker Posey and a couple of Pomeranians? Which is which? Things are looking up!
Oops. Maybe not. While it’s nice to see the lovely Eva Marie Saint out on the rustic Kent farm in the middle of the
Australian outback (“Kansas” -- whatever) -- and the shot with the crazy meteorite-ship crashing down, reflected in the
window beside her face, really is quite pretty -- suddenly the movie goes irrevocably awry.
It is at this point that we suffer the merciless onslaught of The Choir. You know: That haunted bellowing which worked
okay in 2001 and the original Omen and even in the fight with Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. That Choir. The
Choir That Says Too Much. Ma Kent drives her seventy-year-old farm truck to investigate the weird, crystalline
spacecraft in the middle of all that non-indigenous Aussie corn (Spoiler: The Kents were always closet Aborigines!), and
although alien interloper Kal-El -- also known as Clark Kent, also known as Superman -- reaches creepily from the
shadows, it is The Choir that really becomes the main character for the rest of the movie. Sorry, otherwise entertaining
composer John Ottman, but The Choir sucks. Superman -- like all Super Heroes -- is inherently silly. He looks ridiculous,
he does ridiculous things. I don’t want him sickeningly fetishised from forelock to bulging crotch to the tips of his boots,
attended by this crazy, aggressively worshipful bellowing. Upon this writing, I have seen this movie twice, and have
given it considerable thought, and there’s no way of getting around it: The tone of Superman Returns is wrong, wrong,
wrong.
This is not to say that director Bryan Singer hasn’t produced an impressive surface facsimile of Richard Donner’s
Superman: The Movie (No -- not Superman: The Toaster-Oven?) and (mostly) Richard Lester’s still-wonderful
Superman II. He has. The spectacle and strange self-seriousness are here, and although I do not join the automatons pre-
programmed to hiss and spit at the very notion of Superman III: The Richard Pryor Debacle and Superman IV: The
Quest for Licensing, I can say that this sequel generally has its act together more than those did (though it really, truly is
not as much fun as Supergirl). Singer -- who made a name for himself in this genre with the impressive X-Men and X-2:
X-Men United (both of which I liked, even though I slightly preferred Brett Ratner’s third, punchiest, least maudlin
instalment) -- attacks this material with luminous dedication, simultaneously mimicking the echoes of yore (particularly
Donner’s) and -- er -- spewing over it what appears to be a strange sort of lonely middle-age crisis, with the constantly
lionized Superman as his own ego’s arrogant-yet-lost stand-in. The result is sometimes visually impressive but otherwise
quite iffy -- both times I saw this 2 1/2-hour thing, the packed houses laughed and cheered only about three times each
(with the biggest cheer of all coming at the closing dedication to the amazing Christopher Reeve and his wife Dana) --
and although it pains me to say this, honesty must prevail: Superman Returns is, alas, a pumped-up forgery, a bloated,
hyper-reverent and sensationally un-fun exercise in technique.
A few nights ago, it was my pleasure to behold on the big screen for the first time in a quarter-century another epic sci-fi
movie of my youth, The Road Warrior, which was attended by its star-villain, Vernon Wells. Referring to the third Mad
Max movie, which boasted a fat budget compared to the beans on which the undeniably impressive The Road Warrior
was made, Wells said, “When you’ve got too much money, all the heart goes out of it.” Bingo: Superman Returns.
Why don’t producers understand this? Are they retarded?
Also, why are we still being assaulted by aging geeks’ very expensive love-letters to their adolescent selves, like
Spielberg’s crappy War of the Worlds, Emmerich’s crappy Godzilla, and the Wachowski brothers’ crazy-ass Matrix
sequels? Superman Returns is somewhat superior to these and other pricey errors, but in its outrageous aggrandisement
of pulp the same appraisal applies.
Why are there so many irksome little elements here, too? -- from the insulting brevity of John Williams’ credit in the title
sequence (during his own appropriated theme!), to the crazy, cross-eyed nun displayed prominently on the news monitor
(Those Catholics! They’re bad!) juxtaposed with aggressively Euro-friendly Superman propaganda, to the bewilderingly
prominent Mountain Dew ad atop the taxi-cab Clark summons for Lois (all you need to know about this Superman you
may learn at the Slurpee machine at your local 7-11). During the epic CG work at the end, I kept thinking, “Lord of the
Rings-envy; Lord of the Rings-envy...” -- and it looks like this won’t be the last time (Hello, Paramount, 2007!).
Even the “...Returns From What?” quandary bugs: We have already established that Superman can fly so fast he can
make time go backward, plus his original spaceship from Krypton got his baby-self delivered to Earth faster than FedEx.
So why was he gone for five whole years? Why the lame excuses? Makes no sense at all.
Even in the press, this juggernaut is confusing, with Singer’s original quote that one could take the cross (that Christian
thing) and Superman’s ‘S’ shield into the jungle (Exsqueeze me? The jungle?) and “you’ll have fifty-fifty recognition.”
The principle is clear, but with “the cross” carefully removed from the quote, all we’ve got is gutless P.R. If you’re
gonna say something with your big piece of art, say it!
Then there is the matter of the cast. Sigh. With Frank Langella merely mugging as the know-it-all prat editor of the Daily
Australian, and Saint reduced to a cameo, Spacey is the only real actor on board -- and that’s just barely. (I can’t stand
Gene Hackman, but at least he made Lex Luthor fun, rather than merely faggy and petulant.) Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane
is a totally lousy presence and she even has a boring butt. As her kinda-sorta common-law cuckold-husband (and
onscreen nephew to Langella, revealing how nepotism rules the media even within movies), James Marsden gets to play
(whee) a jealous fool to Superman, and really shouldn’t have bailed on the X-Men franchise. And then there’s Sam
Huntington as this movie’s Jimmy Olsen, who is supposed to be all about guileless charm but instead comes across as a
smarmy creep pretending to be a bow-tie sweetie. Bleh.
Rather than claiming and illuminating these roles as did the far superior casts of the previous movies (including Pryor),
these people woodenly play-act their way through Superman Returns, and the result is not Smallville but Dullsville.
Perhaps, having become accustomed to Singer working with the gifted likes of Ian McKellen and the highly excitable
Hugh Jackman, I expect too much, but not a single member of this cast presents an improvement or even an intriguing
variation upon the work of the previous generation (Margot Kidder, Marc McClure, your respective presences are much
missed here). None deserve this criticism more specifically than Brandon Routh, who is barely even capable of giving us
The Man of Steel as what Singer very clearly wishes him to be: A fashion plate, a boy-toy. Watching this kid’s naturally-
brown eye color constantly shifting in contact-enhanced hue, watching him do the monkey-see-monkey-do as if on a
very inflated dare, I struggled but could not help feeling robbed of the excellence of Reeve’s performance -- Reeve who
came from Princeton and theatre, Reeve who never took himself too seriously in the role, Reeve who used his own
muscles, Reeve who got it. Routh is occasionally passable, but never rises above mediocrity: As with the rest of the
skewed-too-young cast, he merely seems like he won the Big Break Jackpot and is expending most of his energy
remembering not to blink in close-up.
And the narrative? Feh. Please don’t get me wrong: I love absurdity. I love absurdity so much that it constantly gets me
into trouble because almost nobody in America has a smart sense of humour. (And Gawd forbid the critic who does not
beg to blur into the symbiotic pop-culture consensus -- direction of thumb notwithstanding.) The plot of any Superman
story inherently involves absurdity. That’s dandy. But the plot of Superman Returns is often just plain stupid. That’s not
dandy. To wit (or lack thereof):
Luthor, walking free from prison on facile script-loophole legalese, cheats one of those billionaire dying women in order
to grab her standard-issue old-lady enormous ultra-high-tech yacht with helicopter launch-pad, the better to cruise with
his henchmen around the Great Barrier Reef and along the coast of Queensland to Superman’s crystalline Fortress of
Solitude, where he happens to know exactly how to make the crystals work in order to get an animated Marlon Brando-
head to pop up and tell him how to use crystal shards to create extremely pointy and essentially uninhabitable land-
masses (combined, they’d yield the approximate total area of an average golf course), the better to supersede New South
Wales (“North America” -- whatever), killing the aforementioned billions (who, notably, would be in no peril whatsoever
if Superman simply NEVER CAME TO EARTH IN THE FIRST PLACE), all of which makes his earlier, blow-up-the-
San-Andreas-Fault scheme seem astoundingly plausible by comparison.
(In the midst of this, Lex solemnly mutters a line which begs for a screen-shout: “This is where he learned who he was,”
he intones, “this is where he came for guidance.” What? The Fortress of Solitude is in West Hollywood?)
Meanwhile, Kal-Clark-SupieSales keeps kvetching that he has nowhere to live in downtown Sydney, but somehow
tolerates the very rude and self-absorbed bitch Lois, probably because he impregnated her five years earlier -- which is
strange because you’d figure that she’d be walking around with a big hole in the top of her cranium where her brains
blew out -- and he re-commences his love for her by swooping directly to the upmarket waterfront house she shares
with live-in stooge Marsden and “their” asthmatic-moppet son, Jason (Tristan Lake Leabu), the better to stalk her and
spy on her family with X-Ray Vision and Super-Hearing (which sounds remarkably like Bad Cell-Phone Reception) in the
manner of a common criminal -- this before Lois and her boy zoom directly into uncommon criminal Luthor’s clutches
in Sydney Harbour, leading toward a final confrontation near, um, Adelaide? Brisbane? Perth? Who cares?
Having been promised such glories by a former liar-editor myself, I derived good laughs from the notion of Lois winning
a “Pulitzer” for an article entitled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman” -- she being essentially a dullard child,
shown to be incapable of spelling, who draws a total blank while attempting to write a new article to suggest the
converse. I just wish they’d gone whole-hog in depicting journos as alcoholic idiots.
Scriptwise: Clark’s flashback to his dewy, Aboriginal, corn-hopping youth: Pointless. Luthor’s enormous “Train Set”
room (which magically morphs into a completely different room when it explodes): Silly. The conveniently monumental
“Saving The 777” sequence (lifted largely from the 1940s Fleischer-brothers animated episode, “Japoteurs” -- !! --
wherein Superman shows those evil-Jap military-plane-thieves what’s what!): Overwrought. The eight-minute,
chemistry-free, floating-over-Sydney-with-boring-Lois “romantic” sequence: Lifeless. The “Bank-Gunner”: Ridiculous.
Lois flouncing directly into Luthor’s clutches: Lazy. Lois has a password on her computer but advanced-being Jor-El
couldn’t put a security code on the Fortress of Solitude?: Madness! Superman willfully crushes a useful and attractive
green Volvo wagon which the humble author of this piece would be delighted to have: Unpardonable. And Kryptonite...
Okay, Kal-El’s home planet blew up. So what? Happens out there in the universe. Why would pieces of it harm him any
more than would a chunk of dirt inserted into our pasta harm us?
This whole “Seed of The Other” theme, too -- we’ve seen it many times before, in Rosemary’s Baby, The Dunwitch
Horror, Cronenberg’s The Fly and even Alien and Humanoids From the Deep. How exactly is creepy ol’ not-human
Superman knocking up Lois any different?
There is one lively scene I liked a lot, aboard the boat, involving the freak-kid and the primary henchman, Brutus, played
with amusing verve by David Fabrizio. Under the terrible duress of both: (a) being kidnapped; and (b) being devoid of
talent, Kate Bosworth tells little Jason, logically enough (?), to go play Luthor’s grand piano. As established earlier during
Superman’s stalker-scene, SuperJason is adept at playing “Heart and Soul.” At this point, Fabrizio struts his knack for
going funny-scary, doffing his “I’m Not Lex, I’m The Other Bald Guy” cap, revealing a demented clown-face tattooed
on the back of his head. He sits down and joins Jason at the ivories, skillfully adding the low-end to what becomes a duet
of “Heart and Soul” -- all sans dialogue, and cannily directed to milk tension from the situation whilst also delivering
genuine smiles. It’s good work from all concerned, and I wish that the rest of the movie (which saliently lacks both
Heart and Soul) could have achieved such elegance of performance and economy of direction.
Unfortunately, that scene does disintegrate into quite terrible violence -- and I don’t mean the laugh-out-loud punchline,
but rather the thug’s shockingly abusive treatment of Lois. Here is another complaint I lodge against this alleged
“children’s movie”: Its scenes of violence are much, much too violent. Aboard the crashing plane, passengers are
slammed about fiercely with sickening thuds (until, of course, they all end up magically back in their seats once
Superman saves the day). Brutus’ battery of Lois is brief but genuinely harrowing -- even disgusting. And then --
although I smiled because I enjoyed watching this Superman get his smug little ass kicked -- the abuse heaped upon “our
hero” by Luthor and his thugs on The Isle Of Kryptonite (a.k.a. “New Krypton” -- hello, sequels) goes far beyond the
call of duty for depicting brutality in a “family film.”
Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I should make a few brief but relevant revelations here at the close of this
review. I went to movie school with this movie’s director, and have watched his fortunes soar while I was cruelly shot
down by the slimy “alternative” newspaper company who recently allowed their boy in L.A. to get down on all fours and
fellate Singer in a total puff-piece cover-story which would be utterly verboten if actual fairness and not shallow
favoritism ruled the game. Another minion in the fold also got to do a puff on the big premiere because she blew the right
big-shot. Thus a certain bitterness enhances my perspective in some matters, and I admit that. I tend to speak frankly,
which led to a backstabbing via their little pet weasel in Cleveland (an ugly town, not coincidentally the real birthplace of
Superman). However -- although en route to the screening of Superman Returns on the USC campus I passed the spot
near Webb Tower where Singer (then an unmarketed fellow student) years ago, apropos of nothing, regaled me with one
of the filthiest (and least plausible) personal anecdotes I have ever heard (I could say more, but why?) -- I have also
come to appreciate the media-manipulating guy. From a distance. Over the years, what was pure obnoxiousness (beyond
my own, for I am truly The Mildest of Movie Geeks) has evolved into a professed vulnerability and a genuine Passion
(Messianic pun intended) for his Statements -- even when they're lame like Superman Returns. Go ahead and accuse me
of jealousy, but it’s really more that I’d also like to be paid millions and millions of dollars to masturbate. I didn’t like
Superman Returns (and I did give it a double-viewing, just to be sure), but I’m pleased that Bryan got bold and has
achieved some of his dreams of fame and fortune with his better movies (i.e.: the ones with Ian McKellen in them), and I
wish him well with the next ones, even though the tagline for this one should have been: “You’ll Believe B.S. Can Fly.”
Whoops, there’s more: Suddenly I am reminded of a rare instance of seeming to have a life, which I experienced a
couple of months ago as I strode the Sunset Strip with two smart, creative and gorgeous women on holiday from
overseas to explore Movie Town. As we approached The Viper Room to see where River Phoenix died (why is it that the
good ones are always stolen from us?), we glanced up at a billboard looming over Tower Records, bearing the huge ‘S’
of Superman. “I have absolutely no interest in seeing that,” commented one of the women. “Yeah, who gives a shit?”
replied the other. I merely shrugged and said I’d give it a go. More recently, one of them emailed me and asked of
Superman Returns, “How bad was it?” Well, friend, your answer lies above.
Intrigued readers, if you’d like to enjoy an utterly unpretentious and wickedly entertaining treatise upon this same basic
theme, I very strongly recommend Philippe Mora’s whimsical and wonderful The Return of Captain Invincible. It’s a
sweetly outrageous romp featuring superior actor Alan Arkin as the eponymous lead, a confused Super Hero (who sings!
songs by Rocky Horror’s Richard O’Brien!), who finds himself lost, post-HUAC, in an alcoholic haze in Australia (!),
and must sober up and regain his powers in order to battle the fascistic Mr. Midnight (a typically delightful and amusingly
groovy Christopher Lee, singing with great gusto!) to save not only the world, but the funky soul of the people in it.
Note: The Return of Captain Invincible is available on DVD and I now employ my Super Critic Powers to suggest that
you rush right out to get it this very instant. Oh, and don’t watch it alone; have a party.
Superman Returns
Entertainment Value: 4/13
Style: 6/13
Philosophical Insight: 2/13
-Gregory Weinkauf, 25 June, 2006
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