Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

I’m on to the fifth and final Superman film from the 20th century, and I am significantly more excited to be done with these than I have been for any of the actual movies. It’s really hard to break down each of the movies in terms of how bad they are, but Supergirl at least set the floor for how bad a movie can possibly be. Although Superman IV is not particularly better than any of the other movies, I almost gave it a bonus point for being 30 minutes shorter than the rest of the series.

In terms of the film, thankfully Gene Hackman is back and at least competent at playing Lex Luthor. Christopher Reeve continues to be a decent Superman, although it can be hard to tell with what he is working with. Both of them are playing bad characters with terrible dialogue, so there isn’t much to enjoy. Everyone else is a pure dumpster fire. Having Nuclear Man speak with a weird version of Gene Hackman’s voice is one of the more distracting character choices, but I didn’t hate being distracted from this movie.

The original plot of Superman versus the Cold War’s nuclear arms race had a moment of being potentially interesting, but then every country just launched all of their nuclear weapons into space for him to deal with easily I guess? I don’t know, that plot’s obviously too complicated so instead the writers just want Superman to punch Nuclear Man in some of the worst special effects of all time.

Hopefully nobody else is following me on this journey, and will just take my word for it that these movies are all bad.

Spoilers

One of the issues with all of these Superman movies is the complete lack of clarity in what Superman can or cannot do. In this movie, he gets poisoned by a guy because he was born in the sun? At the same time, he now has the ability to rebuild the Great Wall of China by shooting blue lasers? There is no coherent explanation of Superman’s abilities, and the writers clearly give him whatever strength or weakness they want for any particular moment in a story. I don’t know if this is just how DC comics rolled in the 20th century or just a product of bad movies, but it’s crap writing regardless.

My Score

1

IMDB Score

3.8

RT Critics

15

RT Audience

16

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