The Man of Steel

Jesus of Nazareth spent 40 days in the desert. By comparison, Superman of Hollywood languished almost 20 years in development hell.

Those years apparently raised the bar fearsomely high. Last seen larking about on the big screen in the 1987 dud Superman 4, the Man of Steel has been resurrected in a leaden new film not only to fight for truth, justice and the American way, but also to give Mel Gibson's passion a run for his box-office money.

Where once the superhero flew up, up and away, he now flies down, down, down, sent from above to save mankind from its sins and what looked like another bummer summer.

The super-size (more than two and a half hours) Superman Returns was written by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, working off a story hatched by them and the director, Bryan Singer, after what appears to have been repeat viewings of Richard Donner's Superman.

Released in 1978, that film ushered Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's original comic creation into the blockbuster age with frothy wit and a cast that included Marlon Brando in a creamy scoop of white hair and Gene Hackman in clover. Christopher Reeve, of course, wore the cape and tights, while Margot Kidder did a fine approximation of the young Katharine Hepburn at her most coltish. Valerie Perrine and Ned Beatty added some laughs, while Glenn Ford supplied a pinch of gravitas.

As nutritious as a box of Cracker Jack and just as yummy, Superman was at once a goof and a self-conscious bid at modern mythmaking.

Years later, what resonates aren't Donner's action scenes, which look crude compared with what he would do later in the Lethal Weapon series, but how fluidly he changes tones from the iconic (as when the supertoddler lifts a truck off his Earth father) to the playful (as when the souped-up adult realizes that the closet-like phone booth is a thing of the past). Reeve worked the tonal changes with similar ease, delivering a superhero whose earnestness was strategically offset by his fumbling, bumbling, all-too-human twin, who was just the ticket for the post-Watergate, pre-Indiana Jones moment.

Singer's Superman, played by Brandon Routh, is a hero of rather different emotional colors, most muted. Like Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, Singer's effort reworks the legend against a vaguely modern, timeless backdrop that blends the thematically old with the technologically new.

The story opens with some necrophiliac wizardry and Brando newly arisen as Superman's extraterrestrial father. Well represented even from beyond, the dead actor receives billing for his spectral turn, squeezed between Eva Marie Saint, who plays Superman's earth mother, and Tristan Lake Leabu, who plays Lois Lane's young son. The Daily Planet's star reporter is in turn played by Kate Bosworth, whose glum mien and curtain of brown hair suggests that blondes really do have more fun.

Lois, however, doesn't enter the picture until after the filmmakers have laid the story's Oedipal foundation, which finds two men saying goodbye to the much older women who will, intentionally or not, shape their destinies.

In one corner, Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey taking up the role played by Hackman) bids cold adieu to the crone who will make him fantas-tically rich; in another, Superman again digs a fiery trough into the Kent family farm upon crash landing. This time, it's the grown man who brings tears to his mother's eyes and who stares at the sinking Kansas (actually Australian) sun, weighing his responsibility to humankind after a five-year hiatus crossing the galaxies to visit his original home.