I finally got around to seeing Superman Returns yesterday. I've been interested to see it rather than excited. I've never been a big Superman fan, he's always come across to me as a bit boring, too much of a goody-two-shoes, too American and well, just too poncy.
My favourite Superman film has always been Superman 3, the one that it has become cool to call rubbish. But Richard Pryor as a hacker who builds his own computer and has Atari 2600 graphics as a missile targeting system. That is cool. It also has two of my favourite lines in a film ever. "Both keys at the same time?!" and "mmm, pate."
So could Superman Returns top Superman 3? Well, in short no.
There are some good things about the film. Firstly, it's wonderfully shot, I loved the scenes at the farm. I also loved the sense of flying and movement that Superman had. The first half was also far wittier than I expected, Clark Kent had me chuckling at him. And of course Kevin Spacey is great as Lex Luthor, who's evil plan bizarrely involves selling real-estate. But hey, Lex is bonkers!
Unfortunately the bad things outweighed the good. Lois's son. Yuck. How rubbish. Put in there to try and add some emotion but he just grated on my nerves, too sentimental. The second half of the film suffered from taking itself too seriously and getting melodramatic. Superman turns from the nice Clark Kent into your standard superhero, with whom I felt no sympathy. And by the end of the film I felt completely unable to care for him. The film was also too long, although looking back not much actually seemed to happen.
So overall, a nice try, but nowhere close to the masterpiece that is Superman 3.
