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Showing posts with the label Superman film series

Movie Review: 'Superman IV: The Quest for Peace'

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Pros:  Gene Hackman's reliable acting Cons:  Everything else, from cheesy effects to bad acting and a lousy script. After the lackluster box-office performance of 1983's misbegotten Superman III and the less-than-warm-welcome for their failed franchise expansion, Supergirl , Alexander and Ilya Salkind decided that enough was enough and stopped making films based on Jerry Schuster and Joel Siegel's Man of Steel. The franchise, which had started out strong with Richard Donner's 1978 Superman: The Movie , began a qualitative decline as soon as director Richard Lester moved away from the "verisimilitude" ethos Donner had adopted for the first two films before the Salkinds fired him in the middle of shooting the second chapter in the series. Instead of a "realistic" approach, Lester emphasized lightweight comic elements that bordered on self-p