Happy 'Returns'

Zen and Now: Latest Superman Honors Heroes Past

Can you read my mind? Superman (Brandon Routh) and Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) are reunited when the Man of Steel comes back to Earth after an extended absence in "Superman Returns." (Photos By David James -- Warner Bros. Via Associated Press)

"Superman Returns" answers a question about the Man of Steel we boys have wondered about for decades.

Is Superman ga --

No, no, that's Batman .

The question is: What would happen if you shot Superman in the eye?

And the answer is: You'd have to get a new bullet. The one you fired would have pancaked flatter than a quarter and be spinning on the cement.

It happens in "Superman Returns," in a nifty little sequence where Our Hero has stood up to an electric Gatling gun hurling wads of copper-coated lead at him at a rate of about 3,000 a minute. They bounce off into the gloaming, trailing neon incandescence. So the bad guy marches up to him, pulls out a .45 and issues a coup de grace. Bad mistake, dude. You are toast.

The much ballyhooed movie, far from great and far from short (2 1/2 hours!), is still great fun. Best is its love for the traditions of the Big Guy: It reaches out to embrace all the previous iterations of the caped flyboy, even finding room for Jack Larson and Noel Neill to get giant close-ups and dramatic scenes of the sort they never got in previous TV cameos. Neill, the ur-Lois Lane, plays a dying octogenarian who is swindled out of billions on her deathbed by Lex Luthor; and Larson, the ur-Jimmy Olsen, is a bartender who in a moment of stress actually hugs Sam Huntington, this movie's Jimmy Olsen. It's too bad George Reeves, the original TV tall-building leaper, isn't around to bask in a little afterglow.

Even the late, great Marlon Brando is disinterred from the archives and called up to deliver a warning to his son, though it's actually Lex and his minions who've penetrated the Fortress of Solitude and learn the lesson from Stanley Kowalski gone slumming in Richard Donner's 1978 incarnation. And the movie uses as its overture John Williams's blast of triumph that accompanied the big '70s and '80s versions, with additional music by John Ottman.

But the truly beloved figure of this trip to Metropolis is the late Christopher Reeve; he and his late wife, Dana, are the dedicatees at movie's end. More to the point, the young actor Brandon Routh seems chosen for the part not because he embodies Superman but because he specifically embodies Reeve's Superman, with dark good looks, a modest, even ego-less screen presence, a curiously muted sexuality and a sense of well-brought-up preppie's politeness and diffidence. He's a Superman who'd always call you Sir.

Yet at the same time, it's not an impersonation, it's a performance. In certain ways the director, Bryan Singer (of "The Usual Suspects" and the first two "X-Men" movies), has found new stylings to enable his leading man to make the part his own.

Flying, for example; Reeve and even Reeves were coached to see flying as athletic, an expression of strength and speed. To get airborne they took off, building up a head of steam, then (oof!) bounding into the air with a diver's gymnastics as he launches off the high board. By contrast, Routh is a much less athletic, much less muscular flier. For him, flight almost seems Zen. He doesn't have to put any muscle into it and when he's flying, he's not penetrating the atmosphere (his hair hardly moves) but rather transcendentally meditating his way through it. His landings aren't controlled crashes softened by super-strong muscles and ligaments (oof! again) but a kind of delicate settling. He's a Supe who's made peace with the air. I kept expecting him to break into, "Look at me way up high, suddenly here am I, I'm flyyyyying!"

That same glee seems to run through the movie's first half, when, since the story hasn't really started, there seems plenty of time to experience the sheer joy of Superman's return. As the script -- cobbled out by Singer, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, among the millions who have toiled on it anonymously -- has it, Superman's been gone for five years seeking remnants of Krypton among the stars. 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."