Superman II

Superman II

See also:
Superman: The Movie (Uncle Cliff)
Superman Returns (Uncle Cliff)
Look, Up in the Sky: The Amazing Story of Superman (Uncle Cliff)

For the first hour-and-a-half of Superman 2 the film continually cuts between the baddies, (Lex Luthor escaping from jail with the help of his camp sidekicks, and the three Kryptonian super-villains landing on Earth and causing havoc all the way to the White House), and Superman basically ‘wooing' Lois after she ‘outs' him as the man in the blue tights. Basically half the film is wanton destruction, the other half placid romance. It makes for a very disjointed movie, and the stories only converge at the end for a very routine fight-scene before Superman wins the day by outsmarting the baddies with his brain, not his brawn - which makes a great lesson for the kiddies, sure, but also a kind of boring anti-climax.

The dreadfully stupid ‘spin-the-world-back-to-reverse-time' plot device of the first film has been replaced by an equally dense contraption that turns Superman human so he can have sex with Lois without breaking her fallopian tubes (An interesting moment when you consider a revelation in Bryan Singer's sorta follow-up Superman Returns ). Apparently the transformation is irreversible, although obviously that turns out to be completely crap. Fans of the first film are left to wonder how different Richard Donner's version would have been had he not been unceremoniously dumped mid-filming, but one would assume all the same plot-trappings would have been present in both versions.

Interesting that the big blue boy-scout kills the virtually defenceless Kryptonian terrorists after they have been stripped of their power in a decidedly non-heroic move, before going and getting revenge on some rednecks that gave him an ass-whooping during his brief stint as a human. Makes you think he might just use his X-Ray vision for selfish purposes after all.