Look, Up in the Sky

The word is in on Superman, and it is decidedly mixed. The reviews lean toward the higher end of the scale, but the bottom end contains some heavyweights. It is not surprising that three of my favorite critics rated it no better than mediocre. Anthony Lane’s review is half taken up with silly, beside the point joking (though he manages to make a joke about Superman’s glasses that is still funny), but he gets the basic gist of the problem. Predictably, Manohla Dargis faults the film for its lugubrious self-importance, and then proceeds to ramble a bit about how Superman is the gay Jesus or something. She’s half right. And, to no one’s surprise (well, not mine anyway), David Edelstein gets closest to the heart of the film’s problems with this concise summary of the film's flaws:

The bigger problem is that Singer’s weighty rhythms are disastrous for Superman, and the movie actually gets heavier in its last half-hour. Spacey’s Luthor—until now less a supervillain than a clammy businessman—mutilates Superman with sociopathic relish: The sequence is so ugly that Luthor’s lame, jokey comeuppance feels monstrously inadequate. But by then the audience has moved far ahead of Singer. A scene in which Lois tries to persuade her fiancé to turn his plane around and help the disabled superhero could have been compressed into ten seconds instead of dragged out to a minute, and the final scenes would make Wagner check his watch. It’s not that the movie is 157 minutes; it’s that it feels like 157 minutes.

Yes. And yes.

My review will be out shortly (a few other Superman/superhero related pieces are on their way as well), and it takes a somewhat more positive (though still very mixed) spin, but bear in mind the above when heading out to the theater this weekend.