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Genre : Action | Adventure | Fantasy
Cast : Brandon Routh, Kevin Spacey and Kate Bosworth
Synopsis :
After a long visit to the lost remains of the planet Krypton, the Man of Steel returns to Earth to become the people’s savior once again and reclaim the love of Lois Lane.
Info : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348150/
Review: I can now forgive Bryan Singer for ditching X-Men - possibly even he couldn't have saved X-3, but what he did with Superman Returns puts him at the top of the heap of action film directors. Quite simply Superman Returns is just about perfect. It has nearly everything one could want in a 21st Century incarnation for the Man of Steel and the physical production is visually as eye-poppingly glorious as anyone could hope for. The flying scenes (especially the Superman in space scenes) have a breadth and beauty around them that almost stops one's breath - absolutely stunning.
As we've come to expect, there is great humor throughout with winks to the comic books and previous Superman flicks and director Singer doesn't shrink from paying obvious homage to the Reeve flicks - a very nice touch, indeed. Singer doesn't shrink, either, from going for broke in the second half of the film's more emotional content and the balance between action, love story, and pseudo-religious, philosophical storyline is just about perfect.
For all the pre-opening hype criticisms centering around an unknown actor portraying comic's most beloved hero, Brandon Routh proves the naysayers pretty much wrong. He's got the look, the moves and the feel of the character down. If his Clark Kent doesn't quite have the presence Reeve brought to the role - (this Clark isn't quite as endearingly bumbling or nerdy) he makes Clark likeable and believable - and makes fully plausible why Lois finds him slightly forgettable. As The Man of Steel, however, Routh takes the challenge straight on and does not once disappoint his audience.
The opening sequences setting up the story have a classic old movie feel, a bit of exposition for history, hilarious snips of Lex Luthor beginning his bid for world domination, Lois and the rest of the world moving on in the years since Superman (and Clark's) leave of absence, all culminating in a breathtaking action sequence wherein our hero saves the lives of those aboard the space shuttle - and ties it all in with America's favorite pastime - Baseball!
Kate Bosworth's Lois is a bit bristley (Lois always was) but she always let's the vulnerable quality of her character crack through the tough-as-nails exterior.
Kevin Spacey's Lex starts off with a bang, but it isn't until the sequence with Lois aboard his yacht - the turning point of the film - that he gets to fully charm us with his evil craziness. If up til then I thought Spacey hadn't quite captured the role (as I envisioned anyway), from this point on he OWNED Lex.
Parker Posey is an entirely different creature than was Valerie Perrine. Where Perrine was all curves and opinions, Posey is all angles and dim. A different spin on the character, but a worthy one.
It was terrific to see Eva Marie Saint - now in her 60th year of films, in the small role of Martha Kent. Even washing dishes or driving her truck, Saint exudes movie star quality that proves the old adage "there are no small roles."
The movie's more than two and a half hours fly by and everyone - at least at the screening I attended - is left feeling like a kid again.
This is probably going to be the hit of the summer and well it should. It has just about everything one could want in a first "return" feature for this superhero and I'm already excited for 2009's sequel! See it on a big screen. Now!
Editor Review: If Richard Donner's 1978 feature film Superman: The Movie made us believe a man could fly, Bryan Singer's 2006 follow-up, Superman Returns, lets us remember that a superhero movie can make our spirits soar. Superman (played by newcomer Brandon Routh) comes back to Earth after a futile five-year search for his destroyed home planet of Krypton. As alter ego Clark Kent, he's eager to return to his job at the Daily Planet and to see Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth). Lois, however, has moved on: she now has a fiancé (James Marsden), a son (Tristan Leabu), and a Pulitzer Prize for her article entitled "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman." On top of this emotional curveball, his old archrival Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) is plotting the biggest land grab in history.
Singer, who made a strong impression among comic-book fans for his work on the X-Men franchise and directed Spacey in The Usual Suspects, brings both a fresh eye and a sense of respect to the world's oldest superhero. He borrows John Williams's great theme music and Marlon Brando's voice as Jor-El, and the story (penned by Singer's X-Men collaborators Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris) is a sort-of-sequel to the first two films in the franchise (choosing to ignore that the third and fourth movies ever happened). The humorous and romantic elements give the movie a heart, Singer's art-deco Metropolis is often breathtaking, and the special effects are elegant and spectacular, particularly an early airplane-disaster set-piece. Of the cast, Routh is excellent as the dual Superman/Clark, Spacey is both droll and vicious as Luthor, and Parker Posey gets the best lines as Luthor's moll Kitty. But at 23, Bosworth seems too young for the five-years-past-grizzled Lois. It's nice to see Noel Neill, Jack Larson (both from the classic Adventures of Superman TV series), and Eva Marie-Saint on the screen as well. Superman Returns is one of those projects that was in development for seemingly forever, but it was worth the wait -- it's the most enjoyable superhero movie sinceSpider-Man 2 and The Incredibles. --David Horiuchi
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