A lot has been said about what went wrong with
Superman Returns and most like to point the finger at
Brandon Routh (Superman/Clark Kent) as the reason. I don't buy it. I think he was the ONLY thing saving this movie from being a complete disaster. This is only the second time I have watched this one and it's slighty worse than the last time. There are a lot of things wrong here and I lay the blame solely on
Bryan Singer, who I like as a director. He knows how to make movies and has done the Superhero Genre before with the first two
X-Men films. But watching
Superman Returns, it made him seem like he had never done a picture like this before.
The film is shot beautifully and the Special FX look good. But that's it. The story that's being told is pretty dumb and almost a retread of
Superman: The Movie with
Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) once again trying to create a landmass that he can profit from. And speaking of
Lex, why do the filmmakers insist on going back to the well over and over, pitting him as the only Villian? There are a ton of Villians that
Superman can do battle with, yet they go with
Lex every time. This is the 5th installment and
Lex has been in 4 of them. It's time to move on. Bring on
Doomsday. Anyone else but
Lex. Please.
Another thing going against this movie is it's run time. If you are going to have a 2 1/2 hour movie, you better damn well have plenty of payoff moments throughout the movie to keep my attention. This had.....zero. Even the ending was weak and the epitome of anticlimactic. For a superhero movie, this is about the most boring one ever, not counting the original
Batman films. That's a discussion for another time.
I really wanted to like this...both times. Sadly, no matter how pretty the pictures and FX are, the most important thing is story and without one...it goes nowhere. Also, I like
Kate Bosworth, but she had absolutely no reason to be playing
Lois Lane at all and
Kevin Spacey was just 'okay' as
Lex, even though most like to say he was the best thing about the film.
This one is definitely a
Skip. I just need to find a sucker on
eBay that is willing to pay me for my DVD copy......