about Maverick 管家仔囉哩叭唆

Directed by: Bryan Singer
Cast: Brandon Routh (Clark Kent/Superman), Kevin Spacey (Lex Luthor), Kate Bosworth (Lois Lane),

There’s a mighty fine line between the second coming and a nostalgia trip. Not so much a reimagining as a preimagining, Superman Returns is so in thrall to Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie that you’re continually poised for a loving cameo from the pimp who told Christopher Reeve: “Whoa, Jim! That’s a bad outfit!”

Sadly, he’s a no-show, but Bryan Singer’s handsome, reverent resurrection steals its look, its soul and its beats from the ’78 original. The structure is all but xeroxed: Kryptonian opening; a Rockwellian Smallville; Clark’s arrival in Metropolis; a daring mid-air rescue for Lois and a cunning Luthor scheme involving real estate and missiles. Heck, there’s even a deliriously nostalgic sequence where Lois and Superman slowdance through the sky to the tune of “Can You Read My Mind?” But the new film’s loyalty to the original riffs means that it rarely surprises you, and nudges it perilously close to a cover version. It’s as if Singer has a compulsion to recreate everything that ever moved him as a kid, but doesn’t step beyond that simple urge to recreate.

The thought of comparisons must have weighed on Brandon Routh, heir to the unassailable Christopher Reeve. Thankfully, he’s a revelation. His Clark Kent may miss Reeve’s knack for comic business, but he owns Superman from the first line. He’s a bruised messiah, radiating a huge kindness and descending from the skies with perfect grace (though that may just be improved FX). When Superman meets Lois for the first time in five years, it’s Routh who sells the fact that these characters once shared a love that sent the Earth spinning backwards. Kate Bosworth, by contrast, lacks both the kooky spunk of Margot Kidder’s Lois and the requisite feistiness of the comic book incarnation. Now a mother, she’s a more mature Lois that comes off as just a bit dull.

Spacey’s Lex Luthor is good value, though, played for blackly comic laughs for the most part, but ramping up to genuinely demonic when he starts kicking the living crapola out of a wounded Supes.

It boasts some big, brilliant setpieces, but ends up frontstacked. The audacious, crowd-pleasing sequence of Superman’s plane rescue occurs in the first third of the movie, and that’s a miscalculation, because it’s genuinely heroic, knuckles-in-the-gob stuff when Supes saves those in peril. The climax is weak in comparison, as Superman heroically foils a conceptual danger – something that could potentially endanger billions of lives, but which never generates a sense of jeopardy.

Don’t misunderstand us here – the majority of this is heartstoppingly good, but its glacial reverence for the past leaves it just short of brilliant.

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