SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE: I’ve Always Considered You the Dutch Elm Disease in My Family Tree

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) – Directed by Sidney J. Furie – Starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, Margot Kidder, Marc McClure, Jon Cryer, Sam Wanamaker, Mark Pillow, Mariel Hemingway, and Jim Broadbent.

Watching SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE is like watching a once proud athlete sticking around just because he doesn’t know what else to do with himself.

It’s probably not fair to lay the blame for the film’s failures on the actors because Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, and Margot Kidder are all still game, but this is a wretched script that looks like it was made on a budget at half of what it should have been. There’s no skill here and the whole film is just sort of a pathetic mess and an unfortunate end to a franchise that has dropped in quality with each passing film.

About halfway through this sinkhole we hit the lowest point in the franchise, when Clark and Superman go on a “double date” with Lois and Lacy Warfield (Mariel Hemingway). Warfield’s dad bought the Daily Planet, so she gets to stick around for much of the film to flirt with Clark. This whole date nonsense was put in motion when a kid writes a letter to Superman asking him to take care of all the nuclear weapons. After agonizing about it, Supes walks into the United Nations, states, “I’m going to rid our planet of all nuclear weapons” and everyone gives him a standing ovation.

Yup, Superman basically says, “I’m in charge now” and everyone goes, “Hooray!”

After he’s taken away everyone’s weapons of mass destruction, Lacy’s dad gives Lois a set of questions to ask Superman. Somehow, Superman and Lois agree to do this interview at Lacy’s fancy apartment, and Lacy decides to turn it into a double date.

Yes, that really happens. We don’t hear from Lois and Supes on this double date-slash-interview because everyone involved with making this turkey probably realized that it’s a really stupid idea. We have to sit through this unholy abomination of having Clark and Supes run around switching identities to keep the women guessing and it’s beyond dumb.

Lex Luthor gets busted out of prison detail by his nephew Lenny Luthor (Jon Cryer), and he concocts this plan to steal a strand of Superman’s hair in order to make a new super villain called Nuclear Man, which proves that Lex just might be, as he likes to say, the greatest criminal mind of our time, but he’s too cheap to hire someone to come up with a decent name. So this Nuclear Man fellow (Mark Pillow’s body, Hackman’s voice) shows up and scratches Superman and makes him so sick that he has to heal himself with yet another “last piece” of Kryptopn.

Really. I’m not making that up. Nuclear Man defeats Superman by scratching him.

Then – and this might just be my favorite thing that has ever happened on film that doesn’t involve Kate Beckinsale in a catsuit – Superman defeats Nuclear Man by shutting him inside an elevator.

An elevator!

Not a special elevator laced with kryptonite or asbestos or magic pixie dust, but a regular elevator. Why does this happen? Because Nuclear Man draws his power from the sun, and his body has all the energy storage capability of a twenty year old laptop without a battery. Seriously, the dude steps into the shade and shuts off faster than you pulling the plug on your toaster.

With Nuclear Man defeated by placing him inside an elevator, Superman then decides the best place for ol’ Nukes is … the moon! Because the moon doesn’t get any sun! So Nuclear Man beats the crap out of Superman on the moon (with most of it done in slow motion, I’m guessing so they could stretch the action scene out), and this fight ends with Nuclear Man pounding Superman into the ground like a nail being hammered into a piece of wood.

Nuclear Man goes after Lacy and takes her to space to make moon babies or something, and then Superman digs himself out of the ground, fixes the American flag that Nukes had knocked over, and then takes the bad guy out for good by dropping him into the core of a nuclear power plant so he can energize the city. There’s a big happy ending as Perry buys back enough of the Planet‘s shares to be put back in charge and Lacy … um … disappears … and Superman tells the world he was wrong to play Supercop and just wishes that Golan Globus had given them all a bit more money to make the movie so the special effects didn’t look like they were made by high school kids in 1926.

The only spark of life in this whole film comes when Hackman and Reeve are on screen together, and some of the old magic comes back. They’re too good at their craft to not try throughout the film, but I could feel some actual energy when they were together. While that’s great, the effect is just to make me realize the rest of the movie play even worse.

When I dropped Superman IV into the Blu-ray player this afternoon, I’d hoped to be able to find something worthwhile. I wasn’t expecting something magical, but I was hoping that after all these years there’d be something here to recommend it. The first two movies (the original and The Donner Cut) offered up mythic Americana in a nostalgic way. I was hoping, if nothing else, that SUPERMAN IV would be able to tap into a sense of nostalgia for Donner’s films, but it doesn’t. Other than that five or ten minutes when Hackman and Reeve are acting together, SUPERMAN IV is hanging out at the bottom of the barrel of superhero movies. It’s nothing more than a bad action movie.

SUPERMAN III: We’re Through, Frogface

Superman III (1983) – Directed by Richard Lester – Starring Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Robert Vaughn, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure, Annette O’Toole, Annie Ross, Pamela Stephenson, and Margot Kidder.

A lot of heat has fallen on Richard Pryor’s shoulders over the years for why SUPERMAN III is such a steaming pile of crap, and that’s unfair for two reasons.

The first is that SUPERMAN III really isn’t a steaming piece of crap as much as it is a tedious pile of stupid. There are plenty of small parts in SUPERMAN III that actually work quite well: Annette O’Toole’s Lana Lang, for instance, is completely small town lovable, Christopher Reeve is still pretty darn great as Superman, and the “back to Smallville” idea is the right one.

The second reason is that if you hire Richard Pryor to be Richard Pryor (or, at least, a family-friendly version of Richard Pryor) and he does what you want him to do, it’s not really his fault, is it? The man did what he was hired to do. If anything, Pryor is the symbol for the Salkinds coming completely off the rails.

There’s no Richard Donner or Tom Mankiewicz around this time, and without them the effects are both obvious and tragic. With Donner, the humor was used to complement the narrative, not take it over, but without Donner’s guiding hand, the narrative now exists just to get to all the silly jokes. When we’re closing in on three-quarters deep with this film and we get to the genuinely solid Superman vs. Clark Kent fight scene in the Metropolis junkyard, the seriousness of that scene feels out of place because of all the silliness that has proceeded it. Even when the film has dark scenes like Superman tossing back Johnnie Walker Red (the cheapskate can’t even spring for Johnnie Walker Black? Have some respect, Superman), the goofiness of SUPERMAN III gives that scene a really odd vibe. I almost want to laugh at the ridiculousness of Superman flicking nuts at the bottles of liquor behind the bar, smashing each of them in turn.

Is that supposed to be tragic? Because it’s just sort of tedious and silly.

There’s nothing wrong with being silly, of course, but SUPERMAN III never makes it work, never lets the rest of the film exist for too long outside of the silliness. After an absolutely wretched, extended sequence near the beginning of the film that has all manner of goofiness to it on the streets of Metropolis (hey look, a blind guy thinks the road line painter is his dog – man that’s funny!), Clark convinces Perry (Jackie Cooper) to let him write a story about his high school reunion back in Smallville. Clark goes home, meets up with Lana, does his awkward-around-girls routine again, only Lana totally buys into it where Lois rejects it.

They go for a picnic with Lana’s son, Ricky, and his dog, but we get very little interaction between Clark and Lana before Lana notices her car has sprung a leak and Ricky has gone and knocked himself unconscious. I’d rather leave Superman out of Smallville, to be honest. In the bonus features of SUPERMAN II: THE RICHARD DONNER CUT, Donner explains that one of the prime reasons he did not use the Lester “magic kiss” ending was that Tom Mankiewicz made the point that Clark Kent should never kiss Lois – only Superman should kiss her. Similarly, I favor a set-up where the Fortress of Solitude should be a Superman Only Zone, where Smallville should be a Clark Kent Only Zone, and Metropolis is where both halves of this man need to learn to work together.

The Smallville sequence is the only time in the film where Lester connects with Donner’s mythic Americana vibe. I wish we’d spend more time with Clark in Smallville and more time experiencing Superman through this lens. With the events of the first two films now in the rearview, and with Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) gone off to the Bahamas for vacation, this should be a naturally reflective time for Superman, but other than some hints about a desire to rush into a relationship with Lana, there’s no evidence here he’s changed at all by his previous cinematic experiences.

The film also lets the Smallville sequences down by never having Clark reflect on his deceased adoptive parents. Lana tells us that Clark’s mom has died, but he doesn’t go back to the old farm and he doesn’t visit their graves.

For all of the silliness in the film, SUPERMAN III’s biggest crime is its tediousness. The film just lags and lags and lags. It’s not in any hurry to get anywhere and it doesn’t have anything special to do with all the standing around.

The bad guys aren’t horrible, but they’re like rejected villains from a James Bond movie. In fact, they’re the kind of villains you’d get if they made a 1980s James Bond TV movie. Robert Vaughn isn’t bad as evil businessman Ross Webster, but they’ve saddled him with two horrible sidekicks in his sister Vera (Annie Ross) and his sneaky smart girlfriend Lorelei (Pamela Stephenson), who successfully seduces Superman.

It’s not the regular Superman, of course, but a darker version of Big Blue. Webster has ordered computer whiz August Gorman (Pryor) to recreate Kryptonite. He analyzes Kryptonite floating out in space, but there’s an unknown ingredient, so Gus uses tar. The Kryptonite they create (given to Supes in a ridiculous scene where Pryor cosplays as General Patton) isn’t pure Kryptonite, so it doesn’t make Supes instantly weak. Instead, it alters his personality, making him a selfish dick. He gets all lustful with Lana, but she’s not having it. In fact, she’s really not having Supes, at all, in comparison to Clark.

With Clark descending into darkness, the film has this really odd mix of his depression mixed with the bad guys’ glee. What Supes goes through here isn’t tougher to watch than what Peter Parker goes through in Spider-Man 3, but it’s still not fun to watch.

Almost everything about SUPERMAN III pales in comparison to the earlier films in the Reeve run (Annette O’Toole’s Lana Lang being an upgrade over Lois). In going for an increased sense of silliness, the film becomes tedious, and Reeve’s fine work is wasted. Unless the Salkinds and Lester saw this strictly as a movie for kids (and they clearly didn’t), including scenes like having Gus ski down the side of a high-rise office building wearing a pink cape just comes off as inane. It’s a dumb movie, too. When Gus gets the computer to pay him all of the “half cents” that are left out of the workers’ paychecks, Webster’s old man adviser laments how in the old days it would be easy to figure out who took the money because they had a book that kept track of transactions, but now … now it’s all on the computer, which doesn’t tell them anything.

Really? They’re missing $85,000. There’s no way for them to, you know, check the payroll to see who got paid an extra $85,000 this week?

SUPERMAN III is not the worst superhero movie ever made, and it is not a steaming pile of crap, but it is not close to being a good film.

SUPERMAN II: THE RICHARD DONNER CUT: There He Goes, Kid. Up, Up, and Away.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006 special edition of the 1980 theatrical cut) – Directed by Richard Donner (and Richard Lester, uncredited) – Starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder, Terence Stamp, Jackie Cooper, Sarah Douglass, Jack O’Halloran, Ned Beatty, Mark McClure, Valerie Perrine, Clifton James, E.G. Marshall, and John Ratzenberger.

It takes about five seconds for Richard Donner’s cut of SUPERMAN II to improve on Richard Lester’s theatrical release.

Now, I’m not going to spend this review bashing Richard Lester; there’s usually too many hands involved in films to lay the blame or credit at one person’s doorstep, and this is even more true in the case of SUPERMAN II, where issues between the Salkinds (the film’s producers) and Donner led to Donner’s dismissal during filming. SUPERMAN and SUPERMAN II were shot together but production issues during the shoot forced Donner to switch direction late in the process. Instead of filming both movies together, he had to concentrate on finishing the first SUPERMAN film and eschewing the second, even though estimates place SUPERMAN II at 80% complete. Donner finished the shooting of SUPERMAN and then was not retained to come back and finish off II, a task that was given to Richard Lester by the Salkinds. Reasons for Donner’s dismissal include him allegedly taking too long and spending too much money, and his reported unhappiness for the Salkinds deciding they weren’t going to pay Marlon Brando to use his footage (which was already filmed) in the sequel.

Lots of Donner-shot footage never made the theatrical cut, but parts of it would show up from time-to-time in various re-cuts the Salkinds produced for both broadcast television. Finally, in 2006, Richard Donner was allowed to create a new Director’s Cut and much of the footage he shot that never made the theatrical cut was reinstated. Full credit for this new process goes to Michael Thau and his team, who are the people who actually did all the dirty work of finding everything from all that old footage and then cutting it together.

And let me take a moment to say this to Thau and his crew. As a guy who’s never been a huge Superman fan, thank you, thank you, thank you for doing this, because THE DONNER CUT is a fantastic movie.

The result of all their work is something quite unique, as SUPERMAN II: THE RICHARD DONNER CUT is an honest-to-goodness Director’s Cut that’s noticeably different from the theatrical cut. This isn’t a case of 10 or 15 minutes of extended action for the scenes we’ve already seen or even a deleted scene or two being restored. No, THE DONNER CUT is a very different film despite still telling the same story. Where Lester’s film included a dimension of campiness, the DONNER CUT finds a tone (as one would expect) much closer to the original SUPERMAN. Donner creates a story that has that same bit of old time comic book whimsy to it.

Much like SUPERMAN, THE DONNER CUT is a 1940s comic book told in the setting of the 1970s. There are plenty of things that don’t make sense from a realist’s perspective, such as when Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) escapes from prison in a hot air balloon being flown by Miss Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine) and winds up at the Fortress of Solitude two days later without any sign of being chased by the cops. It’s literally like all the cops in Metropolis went, “He got away in a balloon? We’ll never find him, so why try?”

Donner could have adopted the same attitude, of course. The theatrical cut of SUPERMAN II was released back in 1980 and even though I have plenty of problems with it, it’s a film that’s still held in relatively high regard.

I’m glad he didn’t because SUPERMAN II: THE RICHARD DONNER CUT is an exceptional film, and a true worthy sequel to SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE.

The changes start right at the start and set a much more serious mood to the film. Marlon Brando’s performance as Jor-El has been put back into the film, and adds a much needed sense of gravitas to the film. Leave it to Brando that when he does camp he still ends up as the most serious dude in the film. The inclusion of Jor-El leads to the best scene in either film, when Superman is making his declaration to his father (via the Krypton computer that allows him to speak to a hologram of pops) about being in love with Lois. What comes off as weak and pathetic in the first film is delivered with much more force this time around. We get an entirely different scene, thanks to the inclusion of Jor-El instead of his mother. Superman is forced to make his case in clearer terms, and his father doesn’t weakly ask him if he’s sure about what he’s doing, but challenges him.

I love it. Superman … Clark … Kal-El … Jor-El forces all of them to come to terms with what he’s doing. Jor-El is less concerned with making sure this is what his son wants as he is making clear what he’s doing. It’s a brilliant scene; Jor-El largely rips into his son. He does it with strong words and a quiet voice, but it’s a verbal beatdown.

And while all of this is happening, Lois is standing way up high in the Fortress, dressed only in Superman’s shirt and some white socks. Now … I’m not the biggest Margot Kidder fan in the world, but if you’ve got this shot filmed, you put it in the damn movie. And not just because it’s a better shot, showing Lois’ reticence to interfere at the unbelievable words she’s hearing come out of Superman’s mouth.

Supes still gives up being Supes and still goes to the diner to get his ass handed to him. The diner scene is the same but because the scene preceding it was treated Superman’s decision with such gravitas, the physical pain he feels when Rocky beats him up carries with it a greater weight as well. Added to the film is a new sequence at the Fortress of Solitude when Superman goes back. In the Lester cut, the emphasis is more on Clark’s painful journey through the snow to return to him Kryptonian headquarters, but here the emphasis is on Jor-El giving him one last lecture. He tells his son that he anticipated this change of heart and he’s willing to sacrifice the last of his energy to give his son his powers back. Clark is all weepy and whiny, and it’s really good acting by Reeve who manages to make Superman look strong to the rest of the world, but reveals himself as a child before Jor-El.

And this is really a film about Jor-El’s expectations for his son. In SUPERMAN, Big Blue chooses to listen to Jonathan Kent’s words instead of Jor-El’s, but this film is all about the folly of taking that decision too far. Jonathan isn’t even mentioned here as a philosophical alternative, and while that’s a bit of a shame, it does set up a nice difference between the two films: Jonathan’s words help Clark become a man, while Jor-El’s words show him what it means to be one.

The worst part of the theatrical cut becomes one of the best parts of THE DONNER CUT: Lois and Clark’s relationship. While the original version has Lois as a shrieking harpy, this version sees a much friendlier, inquisitive Lois. Instead of figuring out that Clark is Superman at Niagra Falls, she does it right at the start of the movie in the Daily Planet‘s newsroom. When Perry (Jackie Cooper) tells Lois and Clark they’re headed to Niagra (a scene that wasn’t even in the theatrical cut), Lois is all for it and Clark is the one opposed to the trip. In this version, Lois doesn’t dare Clark to reveal himself by jumping over Niagra Falls, but by jumping out the window in Perry’s office, and this time, Clark doesn’t look for ways to hide his identity for her while she goes careening down the rapids, but rather uses his speed in front of everyone (granted, they can’t see him) to run downstairs and use his super breath to slow her descent. He manages to save her without making it seem as if he’s put his identity first.

The love story between Lois and Clark is so much better developed here – it’s not just that so much of the hokiness and shrillness has gone but that they seem on a much more level playing field. Donner (or Thau, it’s probably more correct to say) has included the original screen test between Reeve and Lois that takes place in a hotel room. He enters and she decides that she’s going to test her theory about Clark being Superman a second time, except this time instead of putting her life at risk, she’s going to put his in jeopardy. She pulls a gun on Clark and fires, and what happens next is Reeve at his best. The undamaged Clark takes off his glasses and straightens his stance, and lets Lois know she’s right.

“But if you were wrong,” he reminds her, “Clark would be dead.”

“Blanks,” she tells him.

The ending is vastly different, too. After he’s defeated Zod (Terence Stamp) and Company, he flies Lois back to Metropolis, where they have a teary goodbye. There’s no magic kiss memory wipe this time around, either. Instead, Supes spins the world backwards again to a point before Lois has figured out his identity. It’s a bit repetitive since they used this bit in the first movie, but it’s not like they could re-shoot the ending, and what they’ve gone with here is a much more satisfying ending – even if it involves Superman mind-wiping the entire planet instead of one woman.

Yeah, I know. But it works because it plays into the nostalgic comic book fantasy vibe that Donner is so good at delivering.

But the moment here when Lois, teary-eyed and almost cried out, watches Superman leave and comes to grips with the fact that they can’t be together is just masterfully played. “There he goes, kid,” she tells herself. “Up, up, and away.”

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

THE DONNER CUT is an amazingly good movie. If you haven’t seen it and you liked the first SUPERMAN film, then you really must see this version as soon as possible. Even if you like the Lester version, I can’t imagine anyone who liked the original Donner film not liking this one, too. Donner gets great performances from everyone – especially Reeve and Hackman – that this film is a real joy to watch. As I said up top, I don’t want to come down too harshly on Lester because he did the job he was hired to do, but there isn’t anything about THE DONNER CUT that’s noticeably inferior to the original theatrical release. In the “SUPERMAN II: Restoring the Vision” documentary on the Blu-Ray, Donner laments that he and Tom Mankiewicz weren’t able to keep telling Superman stories with Reeve and Kidder because he thinks that would have been something to see.

He’s right.