Last Thursday night Charles and I watched the 2006 film Superman Returns, of which I’d bought a DVD two months ago at the Mission Hills library sale (remember library sales? Remember libraries?), only it wouldn’t play and I ended up getting curious enough about this movie that I bought a three-disc Blu-Ray package also containing the 1978 Superman: The Movie (directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve) and a reconstruction of the 1980 Superman II directed by Donner and featuring additional footage for Marlon Brando, who played Superman’s father Jor-El in the original film and shot enough material to continue the part in the sequel — only he ended up squabbling with producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind over his percentage deal and refused to allow his footage to be used in Superman II (he was replaced by additional footage with the actress playing Superman’s mother — according to this version of the Superman mythos, both his parents continued to nag him even from beyond the grave, and during Superman II I joked to Charles, “He’s probably thinking, ‘I wonder if Thor had to put up with this from Odin’”). Warner Bros., which distributed the first Superman feature, later bought the rights both to the film series and to Superman the character by acquiring his comic-book publisher, D.C., and they continued the series through two more films with Reeve before laying it to rest after the disappointing grosses of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. In 2006 Warners decided to reboot the Superman franchise and hired director Bryan Singer away from the X-Men series at Marvel to direct the new film and co-write it with Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. It seems a little odd to be watching this film now that both Singer and Kevin Spacey, who appears in it as Lex Luthor, have fallen afoul of the #MeToo sex police (they’re both Gay men who have been accused of doing physically abusive things to young men, including underage boys, and in line with the witch-hunt the #MeToo movement has become their careers have been trashed and they’ve almost literally been “unpersonned” in Hollywood — they do not exist, they never existed — even though the allegations against them are just that, unproven allegations, in a neo-McCarthyite climate of fear in which rumor and innuendo can be enough to destroy a career) — but that’s not the problem with Superman Returns. The real problem is that it’s boring.
Superman
Returns was pretty clearly a sequel to the
first two Superman movies in the
four-film sequence with Christopher Reeve, but the writers and actors simply
aren’t as good. The first two Reeve Superman films were ostensibly based on a story by Mario
Puzo, whose name was big box-office following the success of his book The
Godfather and the first two films based on
it, and though reportedly virtually nothing Puzo wrote ended up in the finished
film, the script that finally got shot was the work of David Newman, who with
his writing partner Robert Benton had come up with the superb fusion of comedy
and crime drama of the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde. Newman and Benton both got credit for the first
Reeve Superman, along with
Newman’s wife Leslie, whom he brought on board because he felt he needed a
woman to write for Lois Lane. For Superman II the only credited writers were Puzo and both Newmans,
but they were still a damned sight better at evoking the feeling of a 1930’s
screwball comedy centered around a newspaper mixed with a superhero mythos that was, after all, first created in 1938, when the
screwball comedies were at their most popular. Messrs. Singer, Dougherty and
Harris tried to evoke a similar
mood, but they weren’t as good writers as the Newmans and Benton, and they
didn’t have a terribly compelling cast either. After Keanu Reeves (who would
have been physically wrong for the part just as the current Superman, Henry
Cavill, is, and for the same reasons: he’s too small and wiry to match the
tall, robust figure in the comics Jerry Siegel wrote and Joe Shuster drew)
bailed on the role — he never said why, though the rumor at the time was that
he’d noted the tragic fates of his near-namesakes who’d previously played the
Superpart (George Reeves dead in 1959 in an apparent suicide, though his story
is sufficiently mysterious he was the subject of a fascinating biopic, Hollywoodland, directed by Allen Coulter and starring Ben Affleck
in one of his very best performances as Reeves — and Christopher Reeve
permanently crippled in a horseback-riding accident and forced to spend the
last decade of his life in a wheelchair) — the producers got Brandon Routh.
One
gets the impression they discovered Routh in a Christopher Reeve look-alike
contest, and as Clark Kent he’s got the doofus part right but he doesn’t quite
catch Reeve’s humanity — the contrast between the beautifully written, acted
and staged sequence in which Reeve took Margot Kidder as Lois for a joyride in
the first Superman movie and the
dull, inept rehash of the same sequence in Superman Returns says all you need to know about the contrast between
the films and why the 1978 Superman
remains a joy while Superman Returns
is a dreary bore. It also doesn’t help that Kate Bosworth, a talented actress
in the right part (like Beyond the Sea, the Bobby Darin biopic directed by and starring Kevin Spacey), just
doesn’t sparkle like Kidder did as Lois Lane (and as Noel Neill[1],
who played her in the first live-action Superman films — the Columbia serials from 1948 and 1951 —
and again in all but the first two seasons of the George Reeves TV series, did
before her). And while I admire Kevin Spacey for being willing to shave his
head to resemble the famously bald Lex Luthor in the comics, he’s simply not as
good an actor as Gene Hackman, whose Luthor in the first two Reeve films
commanded the screen even though Hackman refused to shave his head and therefore
the costume and makeup departments had to redo his hair to make it look like he
was wearing an ill-fitting wig. (I still think, though, that the best Lex Luthor on screen was Lyle Talbot, who
played him in the 1951 Columbia serial Atom-Man vs. Superman, with Kirk Alyn as the best-ever Superman.) Likewise
Parker Posey as Luthor’s dumb girlfriend (this time called “Kitty Kowalski”
instead of “Eve Teschmacher”) is O.K. but hardly in the same league as Valerie
Perrine, who was able to bring some
depths into this silly stereotype of a character.
Frank Langella is largely
wasted as the Daily Planet’s
irascible editor, Perry White (what’s a nice bad guy who played Dracula doing
in a place like this?) and James Marsden is a walking, talking cliché as
Richard White, Perry’s nephew, head of the Daily Planet’s international bureau and Superman’s rival for
Lois’s affections. We’re supposed to believe that Richard White and Lois Lane
have been “living together” for seven years and have even had a child together,
but so far they’ve declined to get married — and if there was any attempt by
David and Leslie Newman to set up a His Girl Friday-style conflict with Lois torn between the exciting
superhero and the dull normal guy who could give her an ordinary life, they
don’t bother to do more than hint at it. (If Lois’s alternate boyfriend had
come from outside journalism and had wanted her to retire and be a stay-at-home
wife and mother, the parallel would have been closer and more entertaining.)
What’s more, when Luthor kidnaps both Lois and her son Jason (Tristan Lake
Leabu, making his movie debut) and he exposes Jason to Kryptonite, just when
we’re thinking, “Oh, no, they’re
not going to have Jason be Superman’s child,” he gets faint from being around
Kryptonite and therefore it’s established that he is Superman’s child, presumably conceived in that hot
night Superman gave Lois her Superfuck in the Fortress of Solitude in Superman
II. We’re also told that Superman was
absent from Earth for five years visiting the remains of Krypton after Earth
astronomers had finally discovered them, but we never see the ruins of Krypton or find out how Superman got
there and back (compare to the next Superman reboot, Man of Steel from 2013, where the filmmakers got so fascinated by
Krypton’s history, technology and culture the film was over an hour old before
they finally destroyed Krypton
and sent Superman home to earth) and I guess depicting the wreckage of Krypton
was beyond even the major budget Warner Bros. had allocated to this film.
And
the movie ends with the much-hyped “Death of Superman” plot line that had
already been a success in the comic books (the issue featuring the titular
“Death” was the best-selling Superman comic ever published, and possibly the best-selling comic book ever),
it means we get a ponderous exposition sequence at the end of a movie that has already had way
too many ponderous exposition sequences that drops us the hint that Superman is
alive after all and we can always expect a sequel. No sequel arrived, though, because
while at least on paper this film turned a modest profit ($391,096,082 on an
estimated production budget of $270,000,000), the combination of publicity
costs and other expenses for releasing the film probably kept its balances low
and made it a money-loser … so much so that when Warners decided to re-reboot the Superman franchise in 2013 they picked a whole new cast
(including Henry Cavill, all wrong physically for Superman — too short, too
wiry, not taller and more robust than most humans the way he was drawn in the
comics). In Superman Returns the
best performance was turned in by, of all people, Eva Marie Saint, playing
Clark Kent’s foster mother Martha (and ironically reuniting her with Marlon
Brando from On the Waterfront 52
years earlier!), one of those
move-aside-young-whippersnappers-and-let-an-old-pro-show-you-how-it’s-done performances much the way Ellen
Burstyn did in the Lifetime adaptation of V. C. Andrews’ Flowers in
the Attic and Noel Neill, the original Lois
Lane, did in a cameo appearance early on in Superman Returns, which otherwise remains a ponderous bore, with a
director who was obviously more at home in the angst-ridden realms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe
(especially the X-Men wing of it,
probably the most angst-ridden
part of it!) than the relatively innocent
you-know-who-the-good-guys-are-and-you-know-who-the-bad-guys-are realm of D.C.
— 4/10/20 and 4/12/20
[1] — And who makes a cameo appearance in the opening
scene of Superman Returns as
Gertrude Vanderworth, a super-rich woman who disinherits her whole family on
her deathbed and leaves her entire fortune to Lex Luthor.
