Superman Returns gets two stars and a review which makes it sound like Ebert was charitable in the stars section.
UPDATE: Please note that there are puh-lenty of spoilers in this review.
3 thoughts on “Ebert reviews Superman Returns”
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I don’t always agree with Ebert, but I respect his opinion. In this case, it helped me make the decision not to see Superman Returns in the theater. I may not see it at all. Though seeing Spacey as Luthor is very intriguing, ultimately I’m bored with what I’ve learned about the plot. As Joss Whedon has said in his Serenity commentary, if you start your hero low enough for him to go somewhere, you end up with Harrison Ford’s Air Force One: a smart and tough president who when the chips are down he’s smart and tough. “That’s not much of a character arc, now is it?” Superman’s always suffered from this, and the fact that they used kryptonite. Again. It’s just boring. Supes’ other lesser-known weakness, magic, only works if the production team makes the magic convincing to a modern audience, which is difficult to do, but variety is the spice of life, and there’s other enemies in Supes’ rogues gallery aside from Luthor and Brainiac. Ultimately, this latest attempt, twenty years in the making, is an old trick pony being trained to do the same old tricks by a committee of suited monkey lemmings. I’m sure it looks great, but I’d like to see something more than that. Crazy as that may sound.
I just wasted my money to take my kids to see Superman Returns. Is this some kind of new age Superman? He is a baby daddy now, and the man raising his child, does not even know the truth. He is an obsessed stalker in a day and age where we have a lot of that. They ruined my memories of Superman and showed my son a super hero that was less than most mortal men.
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!!!! The webmaster should be NOTING this near the link.