Superman Returns Review

The plane rescue is the argument for the film's existence. Newton Thomas Sigel shoots the shuttle separation and the ballpark landing with a patience nobody else has brought to the character, and for six minutes this is the best Superman movie ever made. The rest is a mood piece about absence. Brandon Routh is doing a careful Christopher Reeve impression rather than a performance, which makes him spectral in exactly the way the concept requires and inert in every scene that needs a person.

Kate Bosworth's Lois is written as an award winning journalist and played as a resentful ex. Kevin Spacey's Luthor is genuinely menacing in two scenes and then goes back to the property scam the 1978 film already used, which means the plot of a two hundred million dollar picture is a man growing a continent to sell coastline. The child was a swing that alienated everyone and closed off any sequel. What lingers is the melancholy, a god who returns after five years to find the world has stopped needing him, and a film too polite to do anything with it.