** (out of ****)
Starring Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, Frank Langella, Parker Posey, James Marsden, Kal Penn, and Kevin Spacey
Directed by Bryan Singer & written by Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, and Bryan Singer, based on characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster
2006
154 min PG13
“Superman Returns” isn’t terrible. For me, that’s disappointing, because I was hoping for an aggressively banal movie that would give me the chance to berate fanboys and fangirls for whom actual quality as a film is subordinate to simply not challenging in any way-shape-form their understanding of their beloved and unchanging types. Just for once I’d like a comic book adaptation to really go crazy with its source material. Instead, “Superman Returns,” while comprised of very little that could ever be made into a great movie, is at 140+ minutes simply too long to be a good one.
It’s a cross between those syndromes that hit “Titanic” and “Pirates of the Caribbean,” the first being that length, needless exposition, and dragging things out is mistaken for “Importance!”, the second just making its amusing idiocy outstay its welcome. There’s a fine 90-minute jaunt in here and I can forgive most of the movie’s other faults. Director Bryan Singer gave up the chance to direct the third “X-Men” movie and, while that movie wasn’t really good, I still admire its heedless and silly forward momentum, something “Superman Returns” lacks.
I can even forgive the mannequin-style lead couple of Lois Lane and Superman, who are played with non-chemistry by nonentities Kate Bosworth and Brandon Routh, who looks coated with that plastic-y stuff from Body Worlds. Their inhumanity even makes sense – more than any other fictional character off the top of my head, Superman is the least real, and Lois Lane comes a close second – these are ciphers, and for that they need a cipher-length and mechanical 90-minute fiction.
The love triangle in which Superman and Lois play a part is bland beyond words. In it they are joined by a guy named Richard – the perennial name of girl-losing nice guys – who is played by James Marsden of “X-Men,” you get when the real Cary Elwes is busy. Only Kevin Spacey’s scenery-munching and lovably condescending villain Lex Luthor is of any real interest. He makes some good points about Superman is a fascist who doesn’t answer to things like Miranda, due process, and democratic oversight. One wonders, is the movie being complex or is it simply being fascist by putting those words in the mouth of the villain? Not surprisingly, Singer is at his best around Lex; when the madman tests out his maguffin by blowing up a model train-set you feel some self-awareness about Singer’s movie as blowing up a model train-set.
“Superman Returns” is Singer’s (“The Usual Suspects,” “The X-Men”) richest film visually and deserves its Oscar nomination for visual effects. It basically expands and puts more money into what he did with “The X-Men,” although there isn’t much heat to the action, and of course everything is over-scored. Backgrounds are deep and colorful, but Singer follows conventional conventions about leaving backgrounds unfocused during dialogue. The movie was shot on Hi-Def digital video and I’m beginning to make my peace with these live-action cartoons; in a way, Singer has taken them to their logical conclusion with “Superman’s” glorious, orange-rich video game look, in which everyone is airbrushed and inhuman. “Superman” goes in the opposite direction of Mann and Beebe’s Hi-Def “Miami Vice,” in which all is grimy-grungy-grainy and tinted unnaturally. In that movie, we believe everything we see because it looks so dirty and authentic.
When “Superman” finished “Returning,” – much later than it should have – my wife remarked that it felt like a TV pilot. We pictured primetime soap opera junkies thinking nothing of squandered two seasons of their lives waiting for Richard to find out that Lois’s baby is Superman’s instead of his. Then they would gladly squander another fourteen hours of episodes waiting to learn every conceivable variation of his reaction. When did we start wanting everything to take forever?
Finished Sunday, January 28, 2007
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