Five long years have ticked by since the most famous schizophrenic in the Universe pulled on red underpants, raised his fists, and vanished into the night sky. Superman’s quest to find his native planet among the starry cobwebs of the galaxy ends in lonely despair. Krypton is no more. It has been blasted into a cloud of radioactive dust. There are no survivors. In Superman Returns, the hero tumbles back to Earth and crash-lands like a tired drunk on the family farm in Kansas. How do you console the ultimate orphan? You offer him the world, of course, and all its temptations.

Bryan Singer’s homage to the man of steel is an ecumenical fantasy writ very large indeed. I haven’t seen a film littered with so much biblical iconography since The Passion of the Christ. The script hinges on miraculous twists, and Brandon Routh’s beatific hero never drops into focus without looking as if he’s stepped fresh off a cross. His cape barely flutters. His left knee is always slightly crooked when he’s floating above his flock of admirers, and his plain-speaking wisdom would melt the flintiest heart.

Even Superman’s familiar foe, Lex Luthor (a fabulously bald Kevin Spacey), has been given acting notes ripped straight from the Old Testament. Spacey is perfect casting as the dead-eyed crackpot who turns Luthor into Lucifer.

Lex’s frothy plan to sink North America and grow his own hellish chunk of real estate off the Pacific coast is marvellously deranged. The violence he metes out to Superman when he finally has him in his clutches is a genuine shock.

You can slip and break your neck on the rest of Singer’s marble nostalgia. Superman returns: so what, and why? shriek the doubting Thomases. The crude answers are splashed across the front pages of The Daily Planet.

The readers are dog-tired of doom and gloom. The television screens crackle with jaded reports of famine and terror. Folks yearn for an unambiguous hero. The sudden return of a man in blue tights who tackles every crisis like a souped-up Boy Scout is manna for an editor such as Perry White (Frank Langella).

The ghosts come thick and fast. The director greets them like long-lost friends. Marlon Brando makes a posthumous appearance (presumably at vastly reduced fees) to gift his only son to an undeserving nation. John Williams reprises the familiar thumping theme tune. And Clark Kent hasn’t lost his talent for taking his kit off in hotel elevators.

What’s both unnerving and very clever is the way Singer’s film glories in the retro appeal of Richard Donner’s 1978 blockbuster. It’s nearly 20 years since Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor wrapped his fingers around Superman’s throat, but Spacey makes the mutual hatred feel as fresh as yesterday.

The unsubtle drama concerns how much life has moved on in Superman’s absence. The villains now draw blood. The heroes weep real tears. But some things never change: the intrepid Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), still doesn’t click that the geeky 6ft 3in stalker in her office is the clone of the 6ft 3in hunk who whisks her off the balcony for twilight tours of the Hudson River. I’m not sure how much longer this irony can work. Bosworth is not a sexy femme fatale in the mould of Margot Kidder. Yet one of the prickly joys of the film is how much Lois Lane has grown up while Superman has been busy searching the Universe for his roots. “Get the bloody exclusive,” screams the editor, or words to that effect, at his ace reporter. But the only question that pops into Lois’s pretty mind when Superman pitches up on her patio for an interview is: “Why didn’t you say goodbye?” So much for investigative journalism.

Travel, on the other hand, has worked wonders for Clark Kent. The bumbling reporter is sleeker and younger than the clumsy oaf of old. In fact, he looks more like Christopher Reeve than Christopher Reeve did. The jaw juts. The hair looks as if it’s been groomed with a pitchfork. And the bushy eyebrows are suspiciously close.

But does Earth need another superhero? On this evidence it needs as many as it can get.

JAMES CHRISTOPHER

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