ACTION REVIEWS OF 'SUPERMAN RETURNS' AND 'MINORITY REPORT'

Year: 2006 Rating: *1/2

SUPERMAN RETURNS: You've got to give credit to X-MEN director Bryan Singer for, in 2006, trying to make his SUPERMAN RETURNS literally that: returning from the 1978 original with the same opening credit look and starting after the events of SUPERMAN II with Brandon Routh as, literally, the Christopher Reeve Superman...

But if there's any one thing Reeve did best in the title role, it was playing Clark Kent in an endearing underdog manner: something Routh just can't pull off. Instead of being clumsy for the part he seems awkward in the role, and while on paper Kevin Spacey's the dream Lex Luther, he seems like he doesn't want to be there, and with the same exact world-damning land-deal goal as Gene Hackman's Luthor, it makes the arch villain feel even more bland, unoriginal, overly familiar and basically a frustrating afterthought...

Brandon Routh has CGI strength and nothing more

Meanwhile, an otherwise witty (in Christopher Guest movies) Parker Posey is perhaps the weakest moll in film history...

Marsden in Returns

But worse yet is Lois Lane... Played by a much too young Kate Bosworth, her character lacks Margot Kidder's edge and experienced charm, intrepid screen presence and, in having been in her thirties, and while looking older than Reeve, Kidder's Lane really did seem like what she played: a solid reporter who's been in the game and knows more in the arena of reporting and taking risks...

The latter giving Kent-turned-Superman a reason to protect her, constantly, as the audience wants her around too: But the biggest shame here is James Marsden's throwaway role as Lois's seemingly too-perfect boyfriend, trying too hard to be "dad" to a horrible child actor who's really Kent's Superboy. And come to think of it, Marsden, under Singer's direction as Cyclops in X-MEN, would have made a much better Superman: Being the right age he seemed more in tune with the natural fit Reeve had in the part, and he's great looking, has a properly muscular build, and to play the clumsy Kent, he's a good actor... How could Singer not know what/who was staring him in the face?

Year: 2002 Rating: *1/2

MINORITY REPORT: Looking as if filmed with a lens splattered with icky green goo, MINORITY REPORT takes us into yet another Philip K. Dick futureworld where the government is doing what seems is the best for society (preventing murder) but is actually... no good at all...

Jessica Capshaw

The entire set-up is preposterous: Like MACBETH had three foreseeing witches igniting the plot, here there's a trio of half-naked bald "precogs" (one is Samantha Morton) in a large tub of liquid within the bowels of a formidable police station, projecting images of murders that haven't yet happened...

And Tom Cruise arrests these poor semi-guiltys and is, soon enough, like the Film Noir/Wrong Man movies that inspired Steven Spielberg to try replicating (pun intended) the Neo Noir magic of BLADE RUNNER, is framed for almost-murder and chased down like the criminals he used to... chase down: But the over abundance of now dated-looking CGI, and the fact no characters have any chemistry with each other or the altered-reality world in which they reluctantly and awkwardly exist, makes MINORITY REPORT a tedious, tiresome waste of noisy bedlam.