How many more men in capes with bulging muscles and brooding back stories do we need! Ageing Man Griff Rhys Jones rips the cowl off this multi-billion-dollar bore fest

At the age of nine, I used to go swimming, manically – as often as I possibly could – at the back-to-front built public baths in Harlow New Town (gone now.) Near the bus stop home was a big newsagent’s, glittering with forbidden Essex fruit: gum, porn, plastic guns and, best of all, a carousel of hugely expensive American Marvel comics. The US always did trash better than Britain. I craved these dangerously earnest superheroes. I was never permitted to buy a mag, and, back then, I didn’t run to reserves of personal cash. That made them doubly attractive. I had minutes only. Wedging my damp rolled towel under my arm, I would surreptitiously flick through the muscly, primary-coloured, panto-costumed, semi-mythical, contorted, lozenge-headed figurines, as they zapped, bammed and kerpowed across a skyscraper city-scape – not entirely unlike Sir Basil Spence’s misconceived central block of Harlow New Town, in fact – before the number 339 bus carried me away on my mid-Essex trek.

It was a wait before I got a few mags of my own and, then, legitimacy intruded, with Lichtenstein, pop art, fashion and Fellini using the comic viewpoints to aid his cinematographic choices. I grew to a ripe immaturity on this junk in the late sixties. When the first Superman movie arrived, I wondered, like everybody else, what had taken so long, but, watching the thing, I didn’t believe a man could fly.

Despite the shattering improvements of CGI and the advent of endless Marvel Movies, I still don’t. More pertinently, I couldn’t give a toss if the hero flies, miraculously grows steel claws, shrinks to be teeny weeny, freezes, gains stretchability, fights, kvetches, or can pour himself or herself into a tea cup unaided. In truth, I am bored rigid by every ingenious variation. I was nine then, and I’m not now. Then, I longed to blow huge bubble-gum bubbles, collect little plastic soldiers, and have a chrome oblong mirror on my bicycle. I don’t now because I’m older, you see. The unalloyed power of bashing an opponent with the unstoppable force of a Vickers 15-inch gun feels just a little bit gone.

Unlike those sad middle-aged men who can’t shake off Doctor Who, or want to prattle inanely about Star Wars on cheap TV compilation shows, I never want to see another superhero movie in what remains of my life. Believe me, I envy nine-year olds their access to brilliantly realised smash-kerpow, fairy-story junk. But why, on the planet Tarton, should any sentient human over the age of 15 indulge this trillion-dollar cash-in, where not just one, but a whole league (to borrow the bizarre sub-Henty terminology of the genre) of formerly lauded indie actors herd together in order to bash each other over the head with bits of city? I’m done.

It’s made worse that, somehow, these babyish confected exaggerations of simplistic plots might be improved by adding “psychological depth” or “adult” themes. Portraying The Joker as a genuine, disgusting, slavering lunatic doesn’t make this tripe more “adult”, it makes the adults who watch this indulgence more infantile.

The majority of the industry (and never was a word more aptly applied) learned to beware too much comic self-awareness. Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin nearly sent the whole rocket ship spiralling to planet oblivion. It was too camp. It didn’t damn well take itself seriously enough. That was swiftly rectified. Super-movies got “adult.” “Darker” is a facile critical term used to excuse a lurid appetite for ultraviolence. Despite all the quasi-Freudian misunderstood psychology claptrap, there are no human beings in these stories, just cyphers. “The girlfriend”, “the incredulous newspaper boss”, “the baffled police chief”, “the innocent victim”, “the bystander”. Any psychosis is super-egomaniacal. It’s only the owner of the power who is ever really tortured.

Add narcissistic self-indulgent teenage angst and concocted back-stories of deprived childhoods and I reach for my popcorn carton sick bag. For God’s sake, these are characters apparently bitten by radioactive spiders, or with infinite X-ray vision, or surmounting a magic flying surfboard. They don’t get “credible” by channelling in a dollop of ersatz Ingmar Bergman.

The entire overproduction of these pointless fables has become super-heroic in itself. Online, there are several lists of “the hundred best superhero movies” – which suggests there must be hundreds more. How many of these bloody things are there?

Hey. Planet Earth! A ghastly monster called “Greenlight” is threatening civilisation! Can we call for a saviour figure no doubt riddled with self-doubt to cut it down! Where is Captain Common Sense when we need him?

Up until 1990 no adult running a film studio recognised that grown men (are there any women who like this stuff?) would lap up theme park dross by the bucket load. They made some comic films in the forties, but my guess is that they couldn’t fix the saggy bits in the tights. The woolly nap of the cloth on underdeveloped tits rather lessened the impact of the early slightly overweight B actors. Then, pow! Dr Lycra and Professor Plastic knocked the saggy droopiness to Asgard and a gym opened in Beverly Hills or something. You believed a man in a skin-tight, coloured rippled body stocking with a cape looked cool. Zoom! We were off. This thing is now mega, man.

I am Bewilderboy, myself. Threatened by Count Overkill. Don’t enter the multiplex multiverse of multi franchises. It’s beyond the most overactive, tweaked brain to follow the output. Ten years of X-Men overload (ten movies) and a Marvel-captains-spider-verse-guardians-doctors-venom-tsunami of dozens of identical dross ventures. Suffice to say, if an A-list actor wants an A-list Beverly Hills home and private jet these days, they stick on a cape. And there are plenty on the rack. But is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s me rushing out of the cinema.

Kidults, per-lease, what do you see in these substitute baby’s dummies? Are you waiting for a man in tights and shapely buttocks (possibly as a result of radioactive mutation) to zap the monsters of climate change, population explosion and economic decline? To drag Putin and Kim Jong Un by their suit collars off to an ice-prison on Krypton? Will Elon Musk crawl out of his bat cave sporting a corrugated tummy in order to arrest shop lifters and child abusers?

Are our real problems so misunderstood that we secretly want a wayward sociopath with a dressing-up problem to casually knock down bits of high rise while saving us all? Enter Orange Trumpman, agent of Answer-verse?

And now, they tell me, the new Superman film is out. The critics disliked it. A good recommendation. At some point in the distant future, spatchcocked on a settee with a remote control in my hand I may give it a go? No! Pull yourself together, man. I’ve had it. I can’t get it up for saving the world any more. Let colossal worms rampage across Gotham, let traffic spill off the Golden Gate Bridge, let vast flying saucers pin-pricked with lights emerge from thunder clouds and spew forth amusing actors in improbable hats talking tosh, I’ve seen it. Scheherazade has reached her thousand and one tales. I’d rather watch televised golf.

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