Superman Returns

So I watched it till the end, and I suffered. For me, this is a film that is dead both on the top and on the bottom - it refers to something, but it is not clear what. The film quite selectively chooses what it needs for melancholic sniffing and winking. Brandon Routh has the charisma of a folded clothes hanger, and in his role he appears very gay and youthful, which hurts especially when he parrots the one-liners of Christopher Reeve, whose charisma he wasn’t even close to. Lex Luthor, whom Spacey plays in a psychotic spirit, but with occasional bursts of comedic overacting a la Gene Hackman, is also appalling. The film deserves more pity than respect. The storytelling is drawn out, the attractions unattractive, the plot oiled with the fat of love, and the fatherhood is clumsy. Wooden, dull and bowing so deftly that it gives the original statue an awkward five-head. (01/24/2008)

Surprisingly moderate and quite monotonous for Bryan Singer’s standards, without any significant deviations in both style and plot. However, one cannot deny its clearly visible openness and honesty, which impresses the viewer from the very first minute. The action sequences are almost perfectly filmed – the scene with the airplane is thrilling – but the colossal budget is difficult to understand. Perhaps the missing element of realism is bothersome, it is not present even in terms of the protagonist’s characteristics, but it also applies to the setting where he appears. The airplane they call a Boeing 777 is actually not that, a 4G speed would tear it apart immediately, whereas here it comfortably continues to fly. This is just a fraction of the gigantic nonsense this film has. But if you are willing to accept that and the shots of the embracing couple against the backdrop of the night city do not cause any problems (rather the opposite), you will thoroughly enjoy this movie. (07/19/2006)

Bryan Singer, like Christopher Nolan, has done honorably at breathing new life into his comic book hero, but his Superman Returns is a long way from Nolan's Batman Begins or The Dark Knight. It's hard to say whether it's the fault of the director (which I doubt) or the studio that despite such an ungodly fat budget, the result is basically a slightly above average flick. I wasn't disappointed, but my expectations were not exceeded (as they were with the Batman films). Still, I remain optimistic and look forward to The Man of Steel. Something tells me that this time Singer will step it up and film it to perfection, we'll see. For "Superman’s return" it's rather an incomplete 4 stars. (05/09/2009)

At the moment when the accident of the trains took place on the screen, I definitively forgave Singer for the great heartache in the form of escaping from my beloved party of mutants. In front of me, an authentic comic drama with elaborate psychology began to unfold slowly but surely, also seamlessly intertwined with two classic first parts. I would really like to have a continuation in this spirit because Routh is a true hero as Kal-El and Kevin Spacey is a perfect bald menace. Moreover, the whole spirit of the film is characterized by the fact that Superman returns only as a prologue to potential sequels. However, as much as Singer played this part brilliantly, the audience does not hear it, and therefore neither do the producers. And that's why this nostalgic (although quite selfish towards new viewers) way of continuing the legend remained just a blind but subjectively perfect alleyway. (08/05/2006)

A comic-book romance at a cost of 260 million dollars? In relation to today’s Spider-Man and X-Men movies, shifting focus from dynamics and action to a love motif is a very bold move in a 150-minute film. Superman Returns doesn’t conceal the fact that it’s a different kind of comic-book movie, but viewers longing for an exciting adventure won’t care about that. Brandon Routh is cool, but the cloying Kevin Spacey comes across as a caricature in his fascist jackboots and thus doesn’t inspire respect. I wasn’t bored by this film, but I would have liked more excitement. (09/17/2006)