I had Superman Underoos. There, I’ve said it. No, there’s more. I loved those Superman Underoos. By some magical twist of fate, my mother was given a pair of red snow boots one Christmas before I was born, and we had a red bath towel, so I didn’t just have Superman Underoos. I was Superman. And you can take the Underoos off of the boy, but you can’t… well, you know what I mean. When it comes to classic superhero film adaptations, I am a fan and sometimes apologist. For example, Ang Lee’s Hulk is a wonderful, albeit flawed, film. Watch it again. And I’m happy that a genuinely compelling cinematic franchise seems to be emerging featuring my all-time favorite character: Spider-man. (Sadly, no Underoos, though.) The trailer for the third installment played during this screening of Superman Returns, and I am trying not to build my expectations too high. But it looks really good.
So Superman indeed returns, after a nearly twenty year hiatus from the big screen, following the fourth of progressively (and perhaps exponentially) worse films that began with Richard Donner’s solid Superman in 1978, starring the late Christopher Reeve. Alternating between cape and eyeglasses here is virtual unknown Brandon Routh, who does a formidable job, with the help of director Bryan Singer and some reverent screenwriters, making the characters of Clark Kent and Superman his own while clearly tipping his hat to Reeve. As expectations go, mine were mixed here because X-Men director Singer was at the helm (good) and the production was plagued by a whopping ten years of development involving various directors, screenwriters, and cast members before finally being made (bad). The result? A film that deserves the adjective used above for the original: solid.
The other recent superhero franchise revival, the sublime Batman Begins, involved an easier narrative device: an origins story that could co-exist with the campy Tim Burton / Joel Schumacher films without any significant conflict in story or character. The task of reintroducing Superman apparently took several forms in discarded scripts, but settled on the character’s actual return to Metropolis, following Superman’s five-year unexplained trip to find the remains of his home planet, the explosion of which necessitated Superman’s trip to earth as a baby. Singer and the screenwriters have ignored some of storylines in the sequels, most notably that Kent revealed himself to Lois Lane and the two marry. 
Instead, Superman returns to earth to find that the flame Lois carried for him has extinguished at least enough for her to carry on a long engagement with her editor’s nephew. Among the weaker storylines is that Lex Luthor (played a little too straight by a well-cast Kevin Spacey) is free from prison because Superman wasn’t around to testify against him. Assuming that the crime is the nuclear missiles / California earthquake scheme of the original film, or something similar, one would hope that the prosecutors had sufficient evidence without Superman’s testimony. But anyway, there are more plot twists, best left unrevealed. The supporting cast is also solid, but mostly unremarkable, with one exception: Parker Posey is terrific as Luthor’s ditzy sidekick, Kitty Kowalski. Like Routh, she conjures a reverent homage to the original film’s Eve Teschmacher character, but with a style that is her own.
There is a lot to like about the return of Superman, even if your younger self didn’t attempt to leap over the living room furniture “in a single bound” or swim underwater in the neighborhood pool with one outstretched fist. Although the film does not stand up against Batman Begins in terms of reinvigorating the franchise and plumbing the depths of character, the action and storyline are exactly what you ask for in a Superman movie. Like Singer’s X-Men, there is a good foundation here for an even better sequel.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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