Movie Review: 'Superman IV: The Quest for Peace'
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-parody and 1960s Batman-style camp. (I swear, sometimes I expected to see "balloons" pop up on screen with comic book "sound effects" such as KA-BOOM! or BIFF!)
In hindsight, Warner Bros. should have let the Superman series fade to an inglorious end with Superman III, but somehow Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan, the Israeli producers of the Delta Force and Iron Eagle series, purchased the film rights from the Salkinds and DC Comics and talked Warner Bros. into this kryptonite-laced Super-disaster that essentially killed the franchise while series star Christopher Reeve was still healthy and credible as the Man of Tomorrow*.
It's somewhat ironic that Reeve himself was partially responsible for the demise of the series that made him a star in the Hollywood firmament. It was Reeve, with Lawrence Konner (The Jewel of the Nile, Almost Grown and Mark Rosenthal (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) who came up with the well-intentioned but woefully executed story of Superman getting rid of the Earth's nuclear arsenals, only to face a bizarre "clone" created by Supe's perennial nemesis, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman).
If films are indeed a reflection of the time in which they are made, it's worth noting that Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was conceived, produced, and released in the late 1980s, when millions of people everywhere were worried about being turned into crispy critters in a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Reeve, who no doubt had an aversion to nuclear weapons, and his co-writers wanted to address the serious topic while telling a Superman story which also made references to media mergers, corporate greed, and the on-again, off-again romance between Clark Kent/Superman and feisty reporter Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), this time with the addition of a rival in the shape of Lacey Warfield (the then-trendy Mariel Hemingway, whose biggest claim to fame besides her last name was the fact that she'd gotten breast implants to play the part of Dorothy Stratten in Star 80).
The plot, or what passes for one in this made-on-the-cheap Superflop, centers on the Man of Steel's oh-so-earnest attempt to save his adopted home world from a fate - albeit self-inflicted - similar to his home planet of Krypton's destruction. Spurred on by a little boy's letter about why certain nations have to have weapons of mass destruction, the Man of Steel convinces the world's leaders to let him gather every damned ICBM, cruise missile, and unguided nuclear bomb in existence and toss it into the Sun.
Oh, but little does Kal-El, the last son of Krypton, suspect that Lex Luthor and his less-than-brilliant nephew Lenny (Two and a Half Men's Jon Cryer) have stolen a single strand of the Caped One's hair from a Metropolis museum and extracted Super-DNA from it. They've also created a "little black box" they've surreptitiously attached to one of the WMDs. So when Superman hurls his cache of nukes into the Sun, the resulting explosion brings forth a strong-as-Superman-but-dumb-as-a-post Nuclear Man (the forgettable Mark Pillow).
The resulting Super-mess involves a combination of the expected life-and-death battles between the blond and long-clawed Nuclear Man and Superman. As in Superman I, II and III, famous landmarks suffer collateral damage; this time around, it's the Great Wall of China that gets busted up in this less-than-entertaining clash of the titans. And in comparison to the Krypton Three of the second film, Nuclear Man is by far the dumbest opponent ever created to challenge the guy who's "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, (and) able to leap over a tall building in a single bound."
Also reflecting the era in which this horror was spawned is the subplot involving the takeover of Metropolis' flagship newspaper, The Daily Planet, by the Rupert Murdoch-like David Warfield (Sam Wanamaker), who intends to turn the paper from a staid but credible New York Times-styled publication into a sensationalistic tabloid. Warfield fires a reluctant Perry White (Jackie Cooper) and replaces him with his ambitious and sexy daughter Lacey, who in turn sets her sights on Clark Kent (Reeve, who does a credible dual performance as Superman and his mild-mannered reporter alter ego).
If I genuinely dislike Superman III for its campy tone and misuse of Richard Pryor, then I really hate Superman IV for all its flaws, starting with a script that features such trashy dialogue as this exchange between Lex and Lenny:
Lex Luthor: You know what I can do with a single strand of Superman's hair?
Lenny: You can make a toupee that flies!
The film also suffered from the change in producers from the big-spending Salkinds to the tight-as-Scrooge penny pinchers of the Cannon Group. The budget for the special effects wouldn't pay for a few minutes' worth of today's computer generated imagery a la Revenge of the Sith, and the difference between the first three films and this one is painfully obvious even during the main title sequence.
Everything about this flick is either low-rent or lacks energy. Director Sidney J. Furie, who had helmed the equally bad Iron Eagle, tries hard to get some good performances from his cast, but only Hackman seems to have shown some interest in participating here. Everyone else, including Wanamaker, Hemingway, and Cryer, look as though they'd rather be elsewhere.
I didn't like this movie when I went to see it at the movies in 1987, and follow-up viewings on cable TV haven't done a thing to change my mind about Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. I found it heavy-handed in its no-nukes message, poorly acted, appallingly made, and just plain Super-awful.
In hindsight, Warner Bros. should have let the Superman series fade to an inglorious end with Superman III, but somehow Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan, the Israeli producers of the Delta Force and Iron Eagle series, purchased the film rights from the Salkinds and DC Comics and talked Warner Bros. into this kryptonite-laced Super-disaster that essentially killed the franchise while series star Christopher Reeve was still healthy and credible as the Man of Tomorrow*.
It's somewhat ironic that Reeve himself was partially responsible for the demise of the series that made him a star in the Hollywood firmament. It was Reeve, with Lawrence Konner (The Jewel of the Nile, Almost Grown and Mark Rosenthal (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) who came up with the well-intentioned but woefully executed story of Superman getting rid of the Earth's nuclear arsenals, only to face a bizarre "clone" created by Supe's perennial nemesis, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman).
If films are indeed a reflection of the time in which they are made, it's worth noting that Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was conceived, produced, and released in the late 1980s, when millions of people everywhere were worried about being turned into crispy critters in a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Reeve, who no doubt had an aversion to nuclear weapons, and his co-writers wanted to address the serious topic while telling a Superman story which also made references to media mergers, corporate greed, and the on-again, off-again romance between Clark Kent/Superman and feisty reporter Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), this time with the addition of a rival in the shape of Lacey Warfield (the then-trendy Mariel Hemingway, whose biggest claim to fame besides her last name was the fact that she'd gotten breast implants to play the part of Dorothy Stratten in Star 80).
The plot, or what passes for one in this made-on-the-cheap Superflop, centers on the Man of Steel's oh-so-earnest attempt to save his adopted home world from a fate - albeit self-inflicted - similar to his home planet of Krypton's destruction. Spurred on by a little boy's letter about why certain nations have to have weapons of mass destruction, the Man of Steel convinces the world's leaders to let him gather every damned ICBM, cruise missile, and unguided nuclear bomb in existence and toss it into the Sun.
Oh, but little does Kal-El, the last son of Krypton, suspect that Lex Luthor and his less-than-brilliant nephew Lenny (Two and a Half Men's Jon Cryer) have stolen a single strand of the Caped One's hair from a Metropolis museum and extracted Super-DNA from it. They've also created a "little black box" they've surreptitiously attached to one of the WMDs. So when Superman hurls his cache of nukes into the Sun, the resulting explosion brings forth a strong-as-Superman-but-dumb-as-a-post Nuclear Man (the forgettable Mark Pillow).
The resulting Super-mess involves a combination of the expected life-and-death battles between the blond and long-clawed Nuclear Man and Superman. As in Superman I, II and III, famous landmarks suffer collateral damage; this time around, it's the Great Wall of China that gets busted up in this less-than-entertaining clash of the titans. And in comparison to the Krypton Three of the second film, Nuclear Man is by far the dumbest opponent ever created to challenge the guy who's "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, (and) able to leap over a tall building in a single bound."
Also reflecting the era in which this horror was spawned is the subplot involving the takeover of Metropolis' flagship newspaper, The Daily Planet, by the Rupert Murdoch-like David Warfield (Sam Wanamaker), who intends to turn the paper from a staid but credible New York Times-styled publication into a sensationalistic tabloid. Warfield fires a reluctant Perry White (Jackie Cooper) and replaces him with his ambitious and sexy daughter Lacey, who in turn sets her sights on Clark Kent (Reeve, who does a credible dual performance as Superman and his mild-mannered reporter alter ego).
If I genuinely dislike Superman III for its campy tone and misuse of Richard Pryor, then I really hate Superman IV for all its flaws, starting with a script that features such trashy dialogue as this exchange between Lex and Lenny:
Lex Luthor: You know what I can do with a single strand of Superman's hair?
Lenny: You can make a toupee that flies!
The film also suffered from the change in producers from the big-spending Salkinds to the tight-as-Scrooge penny pinchers of the Cannon Group. The budget for the special effects wouldn't pay for a few minutes' worth of today's computer generated imagery a la Revenge of the Sith, and the difference between the first three films and this one is painfully obvious even during the main title sequence.
Everything about this flick is either low-rent or lacks energy. Director Sidney J. Furie, who had helmed the equally bad Iron Eagle, tries hard to get some good performances from his cast, but only Hackman seems to have shown some interest in participating here. Everyone else, including Wanamaker, Hemingway, and Cryer, look as though they'd rather be elsewhere.
I didn't like this movie when I went to see it at the movies in 1987, and follow-up viewings on cable TV haven't done a thing to change my mind about Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. I found it heavy-handed in its no-nukes message, poorly acted, appallingly made, and just plain Super-awful.
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