Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)

“Destroy. Destroy Superman now!”

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The same could easily be said of Superman IV.

While Superman III had turned a small profit, the failures of Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie forced the Salkinds to sell the Superman film rights to the Canon Group. They quickly went to work trying to lure back Christopher Reeve for another film, but the bad experience of making the third one had soured enthusiasm and he had no desire to put the cape on again. He finally agreed to return on the condition that the Canon Group fork out a lot of cash, finance another film he wanted to make (Street Smart), and he be allowed creative input in the script.

Reeve wanted the film to have a message and soon settled on nuclear disarmament after the failure of the Reykjavik Summit in 1986. One kid writes a letter to Superman asking him to get rid of all the world's nuclear weapons. After some prodding from the Daily Plants new owners, Superman decides he will and the nuclear powers of the world are all inexplicably totally fine with this and cheer him on at the United Nations, undeniably the most fantastical part of the entire film. The part where he puts all the nukes into a giant net and throws it into the sun was more realistic than that.

Unfortunately for Superman, and the audience watching, one of those nukes included a thingamajig that Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman on autopilot) uses to create Nuclear Man, a vacant muscle man with a silly costume and a deadly radioactive manicure. He gets his powers from the sun just like Superman, but unlike Superman he can't store that power and is powerless in the shade. Shame Metropolis wasn't experiencing some cloudy weather, the conflict would've been over a lot sooner and we might've been spared the rest of the movie.

Superman IV is bad in every way that a film can be. The script might mean well, but it's trite and corny. The returning characters are poorly served and the new ones are just embarrassing, especially Nuclear Man. The entire production was a shambles due to the Canon Group's troubled finances. They were already massively in debt by the time filming started and the budget was continually slashed to virtual nothing. The direction and special effects are so bad they aren't even laughable, just sad and painful to look at. Money was so tight that instead of using New York to double for Metropolis, they had to use the English town of Milton Keynes.

Milton Keynes!!!

God, that is humiliating.

And so ends this once promising series. Not with a bang, not even really with a whimper, but more of an agonised prolonged groan.

Notes and Quotes

--While the Reykjavik Summit didn't end in an agreement, by the time the movie came out new treaties had already been worked out as a result of the summit.

--Jon Cryer, who played Lex's idiot nephew Lenny, would go on to play Lex himself on the CW's Supergirl.

--After a poor test screening about 45 minutes of footage was cut from the movie, including a whole sequence featuring the first Nuclear Man. Yes, there were originally two of those things, and the first one was even worse. Not surprised at all that he got cut.

Lex Luthor: “You know what I can do with a single strand of Superman's hair?”
Lenny: “You can make a toupee that flies.”

Superman: “You'd risk world wide nuclear war for your own personal financial gain.”
Lex Luthor: “Nobody wants war. I just want to keep the threat alive.”

Zero out of four good intentions.

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Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig