Superman's been gone for five years seeking remnants of Krypton among the stars in "Superman Returns." Satisfied, if melancholy that the old home orb is forever gone, he returns to Earth to pick up where he left off and discovers what Thomas Wolfe really meant by "You Can't Go Home Again."

Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), for example, now has a child. Her boyfriend has great teeth, Daily Planet Editor Perry White has morphed into lounge-lizard Frank Langella and Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) has just exited the slammer, copped billions from an old lady and started a new shenanigan.

The lack of forward momentum in the movie's first half makes room for a lot of pleasant lateral movement. We get to watch Superman (Brandon Routh) rescue Lois in an elaborate sequence in which her plane, trailing flame and shreds of twisted metal, is headed for the dirt. He puts it gently down in Shea Stadium before the thousands of adoring Mets fans who commemorate the return. If only he had a good fastball!

It follows that Lois and Clark deal with buried feelings, and there's even world enough and time for Supe to remember his boyhood in Iowa, where the corn grew as high as an elephant's eye but where he could leap as far as a thousand elephants, end on end or on top of each other.

What's missing? Oh, right, a caper. A plot. Hmm, the movie's an hour and a half old, and nobody's done anything yet. In fairness, the plot is just strutwork upon which to mount ever more elaborate set pieces, as Superman shunts faster than a speeding e-mail from crisis to crisis to undo the effects of Luthor's villainy.

But the news is good. It's a myth, not a miss. The bottom line is that Superman has returned and, again, you will believe that a man can fly, and that virtue is its own reward.

-- Stephen Hunter

Contains violence.