Despite complexities, summer heroes still find time to save the world

His is the sort of hero who seems most like the rest of us and it is much of why we embrace him, this Clark Kent without benefit of the cape and tights. But there is strength in that attenuated face and the set of his jaw that is always reassuring. It's as if we're watching him grow into manhood before us. And there is the pure charm LaBeouf brings to the moments between the mayhem when the brainy boy with a goofy sense of fun can emerge again.

One great disappointment of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," written by Ehren Kruger, Orci and Kurtzman (yes, Orci and Kurtzman are having twice the fun this summer), is that Bay makes so little room for LaBeouf to move. The actor loses precious screen time to the relentless machine versus machine battles, and the movie suffers as a result.

And then there is the curious case of Jackman, whose strange hair and retractable adamantium claws are the heart and soul of director Gavin Hood's "X-Men Origins: Wolverine." He is undeniably powerful, with abs so six-packed they cast shadows, and handsome in a crisply, clean-cut kind of way. The problem is he needs to get his sexy back or to find it in the first place.

Although superheroes don't really have time for intense relationships and they're seldom caught taking secret trips to Argentina for steamy rendezvous, they still need to generate the heat of sexual possibility. We want them to concentrate on saving the world, but for that to be believable there needs to be a deep well of passion doing some kind of slow boil somewhere underneath the cool, hot, cocky or not exterior.

In this, Jackman is not just too cool, it's as if the pilot light were turned off long ago. Yes, everything in "Wolverine," written by David Benioff and Skip Woods, is set off when his nights with Lynn Collins' Kayla Silverfox end with her apparent murder. But still . . .

When we first see him rolling out of those tangled sheets, you have the sneaky suspicion he's gotten up hours ago to brush his teeth and mousse his hair. A super superhero he is not.

But never fear, there are more prospects on the way. "G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra," with Dennis Quaid and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, lands next month; James Cameron's "Avatar," with Worthington, comes in December; and in just a few weeks "G-Force" hits with a gang of guinea pigs out to prove you don't have to wear pants, much less have a cape, to save the world.

I can't wait.

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betsy.sharkey@latimes.com