This review could be summed up in a couple of lines by simply saying:: “
Superman Returns is like a love child of the first Superman movie—it’s just as cheesy and dragged out longer than it should be.”
The opening of this movie is misleadingly dark for a comic book movie. By this I don’t mean underlying themes, unfortunately—just that it’s, well … dark. The movie opens with some space visuals and then the credits kick in. Oh, how the credits kick in. Remember the original movie, kids? Well, these credits are the same … only they are now in a movie oh, so many years later for that retro feel.
Oh, and now we are back to some dark scenes again with Old Mother Kent spotting something happening out on the farm. Unfortunately we then follow her walking across to the cornfield which took up a larger portion of my life than I was comfortable with, to be honest. Superman sneaks up on Old Mother Kent and faints. Oh, wow~!
With that nugget of babybel over with it’s now over to catching up with Lex Luthor. This is predictable with the way the movie has been going so far, in that it’s yet more dark scenes of an elderly lady as she is dying—but we don’t see Luthor’s face until the scene is almost over.
Now we are back to the … I was going to say good stuff, but we’re back to Clark Kent. He is back at the Daily Planet at his old job after being away for the last five years on a trip in which not one thing happened. Clark discovers that Lois Lane has a kid (could Mallrats be
wrong?) and this results in some loss of control on Kent’s part.
The movie then skips forward to the trailer that no doubt everyone has had to see at some point during the last few months. Lois is on an aeroplane with some sort of new hybrid shuttle attached to the top of it—it’s covered on the television and we pan away to the control room. The movie then cuts between people on the plane, people watching it on television, the pilots in the cockpit and the people in the control room for the next few months and then we get to see what happens when bad things happen in a world where there is a spandex-wearing superhero.
There is also another theme going on in the movie which some people should watch out for. Superman decides that he shall stalk Lois Lane and family with his super-hearing and x-ray vision, ending with his trying to get her to cheat on her man.
While all this is going on, though, we have Lex Luthor in a contest where he has to show every cheesy villain-like behavioural trait before the end of the movie. Then the movie starts entering into “
the end game” which is so utterly predictable it’s almost worth just running away. We get
loads more lovely darkness, a lot of water and Superman in the routine of being sick/getting better/back to darkness/oh, he’s sick again/oh no, he’s fine/oh, nooo … sick again?/lose interest.
Lex Luthor decides to have his last lines of the movie to be shouting angrily at his girlfriend and her dog, which is just spiffy for the bad guy character.
Then the "
Superman is he sick/is he okay" thing goes on for another 7 or 8 hours; I lost count at this stage as I was making my funeral arrangements.
Superman is released on the 14th of July 2006. Rated 12A.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348150/
