Superman Returns
August 2, 2006
BLANDLY INVINCIBLE, unquestionably perfect and serenely untroubled by the powers he happened – through no skill or endeavour of his own – to acquire, Superman is undoubtedly the most boring of caped crusaders. He lacks the dark sense of conflict and desire for retribution that propels Batman into the underworld, or the tortured, embattled goodness that persuades Peter Parker to don his spidersuit. Only the introduction of Kryptonite – radioactive rock from his destroyed home planet - could bring any sort of drama or sense of struggle to the character's tediously one-sided battles against crime and natural disasters.
In the four motion pictures starring the late Christopher Reeve (Superman, Superman II, Superman III, and imaginatively, Superman IV), they tried - with differing levels of success - to cover up the vacuity of the central character by surrounding him with charismatic villains played by the likes of Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty or Robert Vaughn, and by pretending – implausibly, that Marlon Brando was the hero's father. In Superman III, a faulty batch of Kryptonite concocted by genius programmer Gus Gorman (played by Richard Pryor) turned Superman bad and finally brought a much-needed shot of inner turmoil to the superhero. Watching the unshaven and angrily-drunk Man of Steel smashing bottles with peanuts, punching holes in oil tankers and straightening out the Leaning Tower of Pisa was one of the joys of the film. It was like seeing Barry Manilow freebasing. The problem was ultimately resolved in a stagy fight between Good Superman and the Bad Superman, and that was that.
At least the films directed by Richard Donner left a little space for the ridiculous, particularly when Pryor was involved, but that is more than can be said for the latest episode, Superman Returns, directed by X-Men helmsman Bryan Singer. Unnecessarily messianic and gut-chuckingly pious, the film contrives to turn Superman into Jesus Christ, condemned to the wilderness and forsaken by his people and returning to a world desperate for a saviour. It wouldn't have altered the tenor of the film in any way if Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) had crucified him on a Kryptonite cross.
And what's with Frank Langella? One of the most compelling villains in modern Hollywood was left to gurn and grunt in the sidelined role of Perry White, editor in chief of the Daily Planet.
By the end, the stirring and familiar John Williams soundtrack leaves you nostalgic for a time - the late 1970s - when superheroes did not need to serve Singer's overblown political metaphors about the responsibility of power, honed - presumably - during his X-Men years, and when superhero films didn't need to be bloated (two and a half hours!) with sententious tripe.
