Superman as a chick flick? That's about the size of it.Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane? She was fine as Sandra Dee in Beyond the Sea, but she looks way too young to be Lois.
Brandon Routh as Supe? Bland, mostly monosyllabic.
Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor? Okay, but he doesn't really breaks loose the way Gene Hackman did. He comes close a couple of times, but the attempt at comedy in his last scene falls flat. The scene where Lois discovers the wigs seems stolen directly from one of my favorite episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. It made me long for Carl Reiner as Alan Brady. He'd have made this into a great scene.
The plot? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
A couple of nice action set-pieces. That's about it. I was disappointed in this one.
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Don't know if you ever got SO CLOSE via Netflix, and if so what you made of it, but one that suprised me positively recently was STRANGER THAN FICTION...it takes an old fantasy conceit and does a decent job with it...not quite ETERNAL SUNSHINE, but in the same ballpark. Beat the hell out of CASINO ROYALE (I didn't try the Supes movie).
So Close is still in my queue, and I definitely want to see Stranger than Fiction in spite of my aversion to Will Farrell.
By some strange coincidence, we watched SUPERMAN RETURNS tonight as well. My reaction to it was pretty much the same as yours. I'm not sure I've ever seen another movie where I said to myself "What the hell is going on in this scene?" quite so often. And when Lois found the wigs I thought, "Oh, my God, she's stumbled onto the secret lair of . . . Alan Brady!"
When that theme music wells up, though, and Clark pulls his shirt open to reveal the super-suit as he dashes off to save the day . . . well, that still works for me, at least a little.
By the way, the novelization by Marv Wolfman is supposed to be really good, filling in a lot of those gaping holes in the plot.
Maybe I'll give Wolfman's book a try.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of Alan Brady.
Bill, they obviously hired routh because of his eerie resemblance to Christopher Reeve.
Bosworth was idiotic casting, especially as they gave Lois the kid.
And I really missed Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty. Spacey played him as just evil without the humor Hackman brought. Yeah, he was trying to get rid of Superman to achieve his dastardly plans, but it really wasn't personal. Spacey clearly hated him and wanted him dead, and I thought the scene of him kicking the crap out of him was all wrong.
We saw it when it first opened because Jackie wanted to see it in 3D on the big IMAX screen. But it turned out that only 22 minutes were in 3D and they seemed chosen almost at random.
In a nutshell, I felt Bryan Singer didn't put enough of his own spin on Superman. Instead, he seemed afraid to mess with anything he thought people liked about Richard Donner's version. Singer's movie comes off as Bill said, bland.
The Superman movie was a real dissapointment, but I did enjoy it being...well, SUPERMAN. Wish they could do for this franchise what they did for Batman. They're still too tame. I liked Hackman's Luthor, but too over the top. I want them to take it seriously, the way the new Batman movies do.
And I hated STRANGER THAN FICTION. That chestnut is way worn out, and...well, Hoffman was good. Joe
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