Superman Returns.

I’m not going to bother with plot spoiler warnings. This is because Mr Singer, damn him, has simply rehashed every cliché that has ever been in any other Superman film. So if you’ve seen the other films you’ve already seen this one: you just don’t know it yet.

Let’s start with the opening sequence. Lo, doth it tell us the entire story we all know in one succinct paragraph, ending with the additional information that astronomers discovered the ruins of Krypton and Superman disappeared.

Yay! Excellent. We can sit down and look forward to something completely new because they’ve dispensed with all the old stuff right there and then.

WRONG.

The opening sequence is there only to excuse Ms Lane suddenly being married and with a son. A son? Oh dear gods no. Please tell me we’re not going to end up… oh. We are. We know we are as soon as little tyke puts inhaler to mouth because that is classic pulp movie misdirection of the sort that left the unthinking masses wondering who in the hell Kaiser Sozay was (is it Kevin Spacey’s fault, I wonder? Does he have a thing for that?)

OK, maybe Bryan, bless his cotton socks (at this point I’m still loving him for X2, please remember), is actually going to address the burning issue of what happens when supersperm meets human ovum. That would be novel.

I spend the rest of the movie waiting for Singer to regain his sense of originality. For doing something — anything, dammit — that hasn’t been done before. Even the new landmass shtick has been done before (anyone else remember Otisland?) I couldn’t tell you what I thought of Brandon Routh, he was so vapid and bland. Oh, except: I thought he wasn’t supposed to be a Christopher Reeve lookeylikey. He was. How disappointing.

So here we are. Superman is in love with Lois. Lois is unattainable but still loves Superman. Lex Luthor has evil schemes involving Superman and kryptonite. All the old one-liners are there, cut and pasted from previous movies, and they even do the saving the plane thing. The only thing missing was the flying round the Earth RILLY FAST in order to make time go backwards — and this was a disappointment because by about half an hour through we were hoping to collect the set.

Superman as Salvator Mundi. That hadn’t been done before. There is a good reason for this. It’s sickening. I don’t want religious comparison shoved down my throat by the image of Superman holding the world (the Daily Planet globe in this instance) while Perry says “Jesus Christ Almighty”, or words to that effect.

Other problems, largely to do with casting that probably won’t affect many others…

James Marsden as Richard. All I could think was: “So that’s why you were killed off so early in X3 – what, have you and Bryan got some sort of bum chum thing happening and you had to go with him? Traitor. Get yer bloody Oakleys on and blast the crap out of that bald eejit instead of flouncing around like a wet dishcloth.”

Parker Posey as Kitty, dripping all over the scenes with that bloody dog. She was pulling the same facial expressions as she did in Blade Trinity (impressive given the lack of teeth) with the result that she continually reminded me of Minerva in Hudson Hawk. Every time she oozed into view I had to resist the urge to yell “Bunny! Ball ball!” at the screen.

Other than that we had issues with sound quality, which meant we had to be on constant stand-by with the remote to turn up the whispering and turn down the bangs (we have the sub-woofer on an eggbox, but we could feel some of it through the floor even so, and we live on the top floor). And it was too damn long. Singer did not need to take 2 and a half hours to rehash every single bloody moment from the previous films. We’ve seen ’em all already, Bryan! Get on with it! It got to the point where the standard “plane goes over the edge and disappears out of sight only to reappear in a moment having made a last ditch save” took too long. Frood and I were both exclaiming “Too long! Everyone’s seen Indiana Jones! We know how long that should take!”

Disappointing is not strong enough to describe this film. Added to that is the awful knowledge that he abandoned the X-Men series to make this film. So he left us with the crap that is X3: not to produce an exciting new take on the DC universe, but to produce this pile of pap. Double damn him!

You know, I’d rather watch Ultraviolet again. Seriously. It’s that bad.

Verdict: only good for playing a Superman drinking game on a night when you want to get totally blotto. Our copy will be donated to my parents, who will probably also hate it, but it’ll serve ’em right for foisting The Da Vinci Code on us.