The best thing that can really be said about Superman III is that it isn't as bad as Superman IV.
Meet Gus Gorman. He's a lifelong bum who somehow gets taken on as a computer programmer by a major corporation without any prior training or experience. After only a few days on the job, he become a genius at it, so good in fact that he can program any computer to do whatever he wants. He even gains the technical knowledge to build his own super computer that goes all Skynet in the last act. Since the writers of this movie were both born before the Second World War I'm guessing they had no idea how computers actually worked and just mused they were magic boxes that could do anything. Anyway, Gorman's inexplicable computer mastery leads to him getting roped into the schemes of Robert Vaughn's Not-Lex to make himself an even richer millionaire, which includes making fake Kryptonite that turns Superman bad.
Oh yeah, Superman is in this movie sometimes between all the Gus Gorman scenes.
Superman III is ultimately a tale of three Richards. There's Richard Lester, the satirical movie director of classics like A Hard Day's Night and The Three Musketeers who was unsuited and uninterested in the job he was hired for. There's Richard Pryor, the comedy superstar happy to pratfall and mug for the camera before collecting his massive salary. And then there's Richard Donner, the absent original director who Christopher Reeve does his very best to remain faithful to, despite heavy resistance from all sides.
After doing a patch job on Superman II so Donner wouldn't get any credit, Lester was given free reign here to make his own Superman movie. Lester isn't in any way a bad director, but he was just the completely wrong choice for Superman. He's primarily a comedy director more interested in offering up subversions of famous stories than sincere ones. This had worked well for him before with the Musketeers and Robin Hood, but not with Superman. By his own admission, Lester wasn't a fan of superhero comics, he didn't really understand them and because he didn't understand them he couldn't subvert them. So instead he just threw a load of slapstick comedy into the film. The entire credit sequence is just one long series of bumbling pratfalls that doesn't feature Superman until the very end.
And that's really the key issue here. This is a Superman movie that has very little interest in being a Superman movie. Christopher Reeve was always very sincere about playing Superman and his take on the character is completely out of tune with everything Lester is trying to do. He's making a broad comedy, but Reeve is doing his best to play Superman like Donner is still the director and there are times when you can just glimpse that movie. Buried in here is a decent enough story about Clark going back to Smallville to reunite with his childhood crush, only to get expose to dodgy Kryptonite which makes him evil. Well, not evil exactly. He's really just an asshole who gets drunk in bars and pulls pranks like straightening the Leaning Tower of Pisa or blowing out the Olympic flame. The only really villainous thing he does is creates a major environmental disaster just so he can have sex with the main bad guy's token eye candy.
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| At this point I realised I was watching Carry on Krypton. |
But the incompatibility of the director's vision and the leading man's performance is not what ultimately tanks Superman III; that's because Reeve isn't actually the leading man. He might finally have top billing, but he spends the entire movie playing second fiddle to Pryor. As a stand up comic, Pryor was unmatched, the greatest of his generation, but as a movie star he was often forced into the more commercially friendly role of a bumbling clown. Admittedly, that did bring him a lot of success, which is no doubt why the producers offered him a ton of money to effectively headline the movie. They wanted his box office appeal and were content to sabotage the entire movie to get it.
Notes and Quotes
--The junk yard fight between Clark and evil Superman really deserved to be in a better movie.
--In early drafts of the script, the super computer was originally meant to be Brainiac.
--Lois Lane is only in the movie for a few minutes because Margot Kidder didn't hold back in criticising the producers for firing Donner and they reduced her role as punishment.
--Speaking of which, this was the final Superman movie produced by numbskulls Alexander and Ilya Salkind along with Pierre Spengler, although they would still producer Supergirl and the Superboy TV series.
--The scene where Vera gets dragged into the super computer and assimilated is pure nightmare material and freaked me out as a child.
Webster: "I ask you to kill Superman, and you're telling me you couldn't even do that one, simple thing."
Superman: “Well, I hope you don't expect me to save you, 'cause I don't do that anymore.”
Lorelei: “Don't worry about me. I'm long past saving.”
One and a half out of four life long bums.
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
The junkyard fight is awesome. I always forget about 90 percent of this movie, and am very disappointed when my brain remembers how awful the rest of it is.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter and I drove an hour out of town to see this when it came out, and I honestly think I've never been more disappointed in a movie in my life.
ReplyDeleteOh man, this one. The Junkyard Fight is definitely the best part of this thing. I do like Richard Pryor, but as you say here Mark, the movie is too much about him, while he doesn't give us his best. A truly disappointing film.
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