Too bad. I like Kevin Spacey.
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Movie Review: Superman Returns
LIBERTAS BLOG
He should've stayed home.
***WARNING: MANY SPOILERS BELOW***
Earlier today I had my first opportunity to watch a $260 million film. I've never seen a $260 million film on the big screen, and so I was a bit curious as to what the experience would be like.
It's been calculated that Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra from 1963 would've cost about $330 million in today's dollars to make. Personally, I think the investment was worth it - and the film certainly made its money back, taking in about $430 million in today's dollars, domestically. $330 million is the price you pay when Liz Taylor and Richard Burton are carrying on the most famous on- and off-screen romance of the day, Joseph L. Mankiewicz is writing and directing, the supporting cast includes people like Rex Harrison, and you're recreating the Battle of Actium without digital technology.
What else is worth that kind of investment? Maybe that Napoleon project Stanley Kubrick wanted to do, or the adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo that David Lean was working on when he died. I understand Francis Coppola once wanted to do an 8-hour, 3D adaptation of Goethe's Elective Affinities. And who knows? Maybe John Huston could've blown through $260 million shooting that 300-page script that Sartre wrote about Freud.
But that's not the film I saw today. The film I saw today is called Superman Returns, which is not to be confused with Batman Begins, or Spider-Man Reborn, or The X-Men Get Rolling or whatever other comic book movie has been out there lately. The $260 million Superman Returns, which clocks in at about 2 1/2 hours - while feeling twice that long - represents an attempt by Warner Brothers to re-start what is thought to be the ultimate comic book franchise.
Whatever I or anybody else says about the film, the franchise has now been re-started. When a studio pumps $260 million into a film, there is basically no point standing athwart the tide of history yelling "Stop!" The franchise is going to happen. Sequels must be made, video games must be sold. What does it matter what anybody thinks about it?
And yet it does matter what people think. All of us as audience members have our pride, and at least some of us remember when movies were better - a great deal better, actually. Some of us are romantics, you might say. And so for what it's worth, here's what I think of director Bryan Singer's $260 million Superman Returns: I think it stinks. I think it's a complete waste of your time and money. I think it's a film made by idiots, for idiots - a film made for people whose standards have dropped so far, they don't even remember what a good film was like.
Run!
Saying these things, I recognize I run the risk of being called cranky or even crazy. Comic book movies these days seem to survive every market trend in Hollywood, every downturn, and so I have no doubt that Superman Returns will open to a massive, $100 million-or-more weekend. The people who always see these films will go see it, lots of people will leave the theater with placid smiles on their faces - so why complain? Who cares? Hey - what did Brandon Routh ever to do you?
Nothing, of course. But Brandon Routh isn't really the problem with Superman Returns - he's merely a symptom of it. Granted he looks to be about ten years too young for the role, but I think Bryan Singer got what he wanted out of him. Routh comes across as a pleasant, bland, affectless Superman who will play well in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Thailand, Ecuador - or wherever else this film plays. Have you ever heard Muzak playing in an international airport lounge? That sort of vague, synthesized, colorless music that lulls you into a pleasant stupor as you wait for your next flight? That's our new, generic Superman.
Supposedly Nicolas Cage was at one point attached to this film as Superman. Personally I think that would've helped matters enormously, because if nothing else Cage has what is quaintly referred to as a personality. But this is obviously not the direction Bryan Singer wanted to go. Why? I think because personalities are funny, unpredictable things. They have rough edges. They lead people in unexpected directions. And you really can't base a $260 million franchise film on a 'personality,' can you?
No, you can't. Executives at Warner Brother would find that fiscally imprudent, and so what do we get instead with Superman Returns? You get bland, affectless actors like Kevin Spacey (playing Lex Luthor). Experts have been telling me for years that Kevin Spacey is a bona-fide Hollywood 'star.' Really? Well, it's funny because I remember Gene Hackman playing this same role years ago, and Spacey's flat performance is an embarrassment by comparison.
You also get people like Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane. Actually, you get Kate Bosworth as hard-bitten, Pulitzer Prize winning, mother-of-a-5-year-old Lois Lane, a role Bosworth might've been suited to if she was ten years older and a bit more care-worn in the face. The problem is that Bosworth is 23, and although she might've looked great in a bikini in Blue Crush she doesn't have much of a personality.
Anybody sensing a pattern here?
Another exciting moment with Kevin Spacey.
Our new Superman, incidentally, doesn't even stand for "Truth, Justice & The American Way," anymore. Playing Daily Planet editor Perry White, Frank Langella tells us that Superman stands for "Truth and Justice …" and leaves it at that. The Superman Returns press materials tell me that Superman now stands for "truth, justice and all that is good." "All that is good" is apparently the phrase of choice when "The American Way" sounds too - what? Imperialistic? Jingoistic? Symptomatic of Bush-style militarism? I'm not sure, exactly. All I know is this 'American Way' stuff is now apparently too edgy and controversial for a Warner Brothers product shipped to Peru, Pakistan and Malaysia. Don't want to offend anyone!
Perhaps I should pause at this point and talk about Superman Returns' plot. Are you interested in the plot? God help you, if you are. Here goes: Superman has been away for a while, 5 years to be precise. Although Bryan Singer apparently wants to situate the Superman Returns storyline 5 years after Christopher Reeve's Superman II (we're supposed to forget Superman III-IV ever happened, probably a good idea), the problem is that Brandon Routh looks like he's about 20. And since Kate Bosworth looks about 18, everything starts to become a little confusing.
But fine. So Superman comes home, landing in a field where he's reunited with his mother, played by Eva Marie Saint - sadly she only a gets a few minutes' screen time. And wouldn't you know it, right as Superman gets home, it turns out that Lex Luthor has just inherited a fortune - allowing him to travel to the North Pole where he invades Superman's curiously unguarded home in the ice. There Luthor gets to spend a few minutes with the computer-generated face of Marlon Brando (does Brando get residuals, being deceased?), and picks up a few Superman crystals with which Luthor intends to devise an evil plot to … create a new continent off the Atlantic seaboard, one that will drown the United States as it rises from the sea!
Back in Metropolis or Gotham City or New York - whatever it is - Superman/Clark Kent reunites with Lois Lane, whom we learn has had an illegitimate child since he's been away. The kid is asthmatic and looks creepy, sort of like the kid from The Omen. Otherwise, Lois has been carrying the torch for Superman, even though Lois now has a significant other who just happens to be played by X-Man James Marsden, doing double-duty in superhero films this summer. The less said about this little love triangle, the better. Basically we get a lot of pouting, a lot of long, soulful looks. Marsden, by the way, looks a lot like that guy who's Jessica Simpson's ex-husband - which I suppose is a kind of qualification for this type of film.
"Um, Clark you're, like, really annonying me?"
Characters and plotline really aren't very important here. Superman Returns exists in order to provide one violent and spectacular FX sequence after another. For whatever reason, incidentally, most of these sequences involve Kate Bosworth getting thrown around like a rag doll. There was a more civilized time when violence against women was kept to a minimum on screen; not anymore, apparently. Mr. Singer likes it rough.
Superman Returns' FX tend to be on the hyper-detailed side, and impressive. Clearly about $200 million of the film's budget was spent on FX, but after a while the visuals cease to be compelling. You just want a character, some recognizably human personality to hang on to. You can't make a 2 1/2 hour film and not have characters - but that's basically what Singer's done here. He expects you to be 'blown away' so much that you don't notice what's missing: humanity, emotion, personality. One other point: superior filmmakers like George Lucas and Peter Jackson use visual effects to create worlds, new environments. Singer does none of that - his New York looks no different than Spider-Man's New York, no different from any other New York - just louder and a lot more violent.
I'd like to stop the review here and make a suggestion to the powers-that-be in Hollywood. Although some of you read this blog, you won't listen, because the din of the cash registers will be too loud when this film opens in a few weeks … but here goes anyway. Hollywood spends a lot of its time and seemingly all its money these days making superhero movies about guys with 'special powers.' Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, X-Men, Daredevil, Hulk, Fantastic Four, etc., ad nauseum. And here's the rub: I don't remember guys like Humphrey Bogart or Gary Cooper or James Cagney or John Wayne or even Harrison Ford having 'special powers.' The only 'special powers' those guys had were their fists, their wits, and their character - their substance as human beings. Most of us in life don't have 'special powers' to brood over. We're just regular Joes trying to get by, and we have a hard time relating to wonderboys like Brandon Routh or Tobey Maguire because their problems seem extremely trivial, and because while they probably look great in Zegna suits on the cover of GQ they don't look like they can take a punch. Nor do they seem to stand for much. I know what Gary Cooper stood for in his films. I have no frigging clue what your cute little superheros stand for, other than their own narcissism.
Just think this over, folks, because this comic book thing is getting really old.
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