Superman III (1983) Warner Bros./Action-Adventure RT: 125 minutes Rated PG (comic book style violence, language, suggestive material, alcohol abuse) Director: Richard Lester Screenplay: David Newman and Leslie Newman Music: Ken Thorne Cinematography: Robert Paynter Release date: June 17, 1983 (US) Cast: Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure, Annette O’Toole, Robert Vaughn, Annie Ross, Pamela Stephenson, Margot Kidder, Gavan O’Herlihy, Paul Kaethler. Box Office: $60M (US)/$80.2M (World)
Rating: *
After the phenomenal heights achieved by the first two Superman movies, Superman III comes as a tremendous letdown. There’s so much wrong with this movie, I hardly know where to begin. Let’s start with the opening credits sequence which is a prolonged slapstick sequence featuring all sorts of comic mayhem on the streets of Metropolis. It features such gags as a blind man losing his guide dog and grabbing hold of a street-line painting machine and a mime falling all over the place after somebody breaks a gumball machine. One poor guy drives his car onto the sidewalk and knocks over a fire hydrant, filling the inside of his car with water. Of course, Superman comes to the rescue, rips the roof right off the car and saves the drowning man. Not only is the sequence unfunny, it doesn’t even belong in a Superman movie. It’s just the beginning of a truly sorrowful experience.
Meanwhile, Gus Gorman (Pryor, Stir Crazy) is an unemployed guy who discovers that he is some sort of computer genius. He gets a job as a programmer and embezzles over $85,000 from his employer, wealthy industrialist Ross Webster (Vaughn, The Magnificent Seven). He admires the greedy man’s dishonest nature. Webster blackmails Gorman into helping him with an evil scheme to corner the world market on coffee by having him reprogram the Vulcan satellite to create harsh weather conditions that will destroy Columbia’s entire coffee bean crop. Okay, even a little kid knows that you can’t use a computerized satellite to create hurricanes and tornadoes.
Meanwhile, Clark Kent (Reeve) is heading back to his hometown of Smallville to do a story on his high school reunion while Lois Lane (Kidder) is off to Bermuda for another story. Lane isn’t in this movie too much which allows Kent a new romantic interest; his old high school crush Lana Lang (O’Toole, 48 Hrs). Kent spends a lot of time in Smallville and develops a relationship with Lang and her young son Ricky (Kaethler). He even gets an opportunity to turn into Superman and save Ricky from being killed by the blades of a wheat cutter.
Superman also ruins Webster’s coffee scam for which the irate corporate CEO vows revenge. He devises a plan to kill the superhero. He has Gorman locate a chunk of the planet Krypton in outer space and analyze it so a synthetic version can be made. It contains an unknown element so Gorman improvises and replaces the unknown element with tar (he gets it from a pack of cigarettes). Gorman and Webster’s sister Vera (Ross, Short Cuts) dress as Army personnel and present the chunk of ersatz Kryptonite to Superman at a ceremony in Smallville. It doesn’t kill him, but it turns the superhero into a supercreep. Superman becomes a selfish, mean and destructive being (he straightens the Leaning Tower of Pisa and blows out the Olympic flame). With Superman out of the equation (for the moment anyway), Webster proceeds with his next scheme. He wants to control the world’s oil supply by creating an oil shortage. He has Gus redirect all of the oil tankers in the ocean to a 50-mile radius and wait for further instructions. All but one of the tankers obey the command, so Webster’s vampish and bubble-headed mistress Lorelei (Stephenson, History of the World: Part I) convinces “evil Superman” to punch a hole in the ship and cause all of its oil to spill into the ocean.
Superman III is already slow and boring not to mention ridiculous (even by comic book movie standards), but there’s a point when the whole movie just stops dead and that’s when “evil Superman” and “good Clark Kent” have a prolonged and drawn out fight in a junkyard. I think it’s supposed to be saying something about the duality of man, but I find it difficult to attribute anything that intelligent to this movie. As always, good triumphs over evil and Superman is back to his old self.
By this time, Webster and company have built a supercomputer, one that will do ANYTHING Gorman commands it to do. It manages to locate the right composition of Kryptonite and when Superman arrives on the scene, he gets zapped with a Kryptonite beam. That is, after he manages to dodge all the rockets and missiles that are fired at him as he approaches the location of the supercomputer. Gorman realizes that he doesn’t want to go down in history as the man who killed Superman so he tries to destroy the computer, but the machine has taken on a life of its own. It’s up to Superman to save the day from this mechanical menace which has turned Vera into a killer cyborg. I’m going to stop here because I think that everybody over the age of 5 already knows how it will end. Superman III is completely predictable, utterly mindless and totally boring.
My biggest problem with Superman III is that even though the movie is intended for children, the majority of the audience being around 9 or 10YO, they won’t understand Webster’s schemes about cornering the world market on coffee or creating a national gas shortage. This kind of thing is going to fly right over their heads. Kids don’t know anything about stocks and finance. The villains aren’t particularly interesting. At least Lex Luthor tore up the scenery. Webster barely registers a blip on a life support machine. And what about Pryor’s character? Is he supposed to be a villain? He’s too innocuous to make an effective bad guy; he’s more like some dumb kid who finds himself in over his head at the deep end of the pool.
There’s a real problem with continuity. For example, Superman puts the spilled oil back into the tanker and repairs the damage. In the very next scene, the gas shortage is over and customers can get more than two gallons a day. How is that even possible? I know, the Superman movies aren’t known for their sense of realism, but it should still be believable in an improbable context. The special effects are terrible. It all looks so phony, especially the scene where Superman freezes up a whole lake and flies about five miles with it and uses the water to put out a fire at a chemical plant. Even in 1983, it looked incredibly fake.
Now let’s look at the performances. None of them are particularly good. Even Reeve seems fed up with the whole thing, but he still tries to deliver a sincere performance and take it seriously. That’s odd because nobody else in Superman III is taking it seriously. The performances are pretty broad and campy and not in a fun way. Pryor has a few amusing moments, but his character is too unbelievable to be part of the Superman mythology. I thought it was an interesting idea to give Kent/Superman a new love interest, Lana Lang is a typical small town girl, forced to be more independent after her divorce. The only guy in Smallville who’s available is her old high school boyfriend Brad (O’Herlihy, Death Wish 3), a mean, sexist, alcoholic security guard and Kent’s former bully/tormentor. His character is so unsavory that you wonder whether he even belongs in a movie aimed at a younger audience.
Even though none of the performers are taking Superman III seriously, they don’t really seem to be having any fun either. One other thing, it would appear that nobody is amazed by Superman anymore. When he arrives at the scene of a dangerous situation instead of “Wow! It’s Superman”, it’s “Oh, it’s Superman. What’s up?” The sense of wonder from the first two movies is gone. Everybody just seems resigned to the fact that a man who can fly lives among them. I expect that’s how members of the audience were feeling while watching this bore of a summer movie. Superman III crashes and burns instead of flying high like its predecessors. That’s the saddest part of a sad three-quel.
